■:±:WM^- 


THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 

OF  CALIFORNIA 
RIVERSIDE 


'  4 


THE   LITERATURE 


OF 


THE    GEORGIAN    ERA 


BY 

WILLIAM  MINTO 

PROFESSOR    OF    ENGLISH    LITERATURE    AND    LOGIC    IN    THE 
UNIVERSITY    OF    ABERDEEN 

EDITED 
WITH  A  BIOGRAPHICAL  INTRODUCTION  BY 

WILLIAM  KNIGHT,  LL.D. 

FROFESSOR    OF    MORAL    PHILOSOPHY    IN    THE 
UNIVERSITY    OF    ST.  ANDREWS 


NEW    YORK 

HARPER    &    BROTHERS    PUBLISHERS 

1895 


Copyright,  1894,  by  Harper  &  Brothers. 


All  rights  reserved. 


PREFACE 


The  following  lectures  by  Professor  Minto  on 
"  The  Literature  of  the  Georgian  Era  "  were  origi- 
nally delivered,  not  to  the  Arts  students  whom 
he  addressed  in  the  University  class-room,  but 
to  a  special  audience  brought  together  in  the 
Music  Hall  of  Aberdeen,  under  the  auspices  of 
the  Local  Examination  Committee  of  the  Senatus 
Academicus.  This  will  explain  why  some  points 
are  treated  in  greater  detail  than  would  have 
been  necessary  in  addressing  advanced  students. 
As  explained  in  the  Introduction,  to  Mr.  John 
H.  Lobban  belongs  the  credit — as  he  had  all  the 
labor — of  looking  up  and  copying  out  the  illus- 
trative extracts  from  the  authors  referred  to  or 
criticized  by  his  master. 

In  addition  to  these  Lectures,  and  as  a  cognate 
Supplement,  it  has  been  thought  expedient  to 
publish  three  essays  by  Professor  Minto,  which 
were  ready  for  press  before  his  death,  and  were 
meant  by  him  to  be  included  in  a  work  to  be  en- 
titled "Reconsiderations  of  some  Current  Concep- 
tions about  Eminent  Poets."  Two  of  them  are 
devoted  to  Pope,  the  former  being  a  criticism  of 
Mr.  Courthope's  Biography,  and  the  latter  a 
noteworthy  discussion  on  "The  Supposed  Tyr- 
anny of  Pope."  These  were  contributed  to  Mac- 
millarts  Magazine  in  January,  1890,  and  Sep- 


ia 


IV  PREFACE 

tember,  1888,  and  the  right  of  reproducing  them 
has  been  generously  conceded  by  the  owners  of 
the  copyright.  The  other,  on  Burns,  has  not 
been  previously  published.  It  was  delivered  as 
a  lecture  before  the  Edinburgh  Philosophical  In- 
stitution. In  reference  to  it,  as  Mr.  Lobban  tells 
us,  Professor  Minto  said  that  it  was  "most  dis- 
tinctly the  best  thing"  that  he  had  ever  written. 
The  projected  "Reconsiderations"  would  have 
included,  among  others,  an  essay  on  John  Donne, 
two  papers  on  Wordsworth, — originally  contrib- 
uted to  the  Nineteentli  Century, — and  another  on 
"  Matthew  Arnold's  Meliorism."  As  the  last  of 
these  does  not  fall  within  the  literature  of  the 
era  included  in  the  lectures  which  follow,  and 
the  first  belongs  to  a  previous  period,  while 
Wordsworth  has  been  discussed  in  the  course  of 
this  volume,  these  papers  are  not  included  in 
the  Supplement. 

W.  K. 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 
BIOGRAPHICAL   INTRDOUCTION ix 

LECTURES 
CHAPTER  I 

THE  POSITION  OF  MEN  OF  LETTERS  IN  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY 

Decline  of  royal  patronage — Why  is  the  Georgian  Era  a  distinct 
literary  period? — Condition  of  poetry  during  the  century,  and 
views  of  its  critics  as  to  the  meaning  of  nature 1 

CHAPTER  II 

POPE 

Brief  literary  biography — His  poems  fall  into  three  periods — 
Eclogues,  and  the  discussion  as  to  the  merits  of  pastoral 
poetry — Walsh — Connection  between  English  pastorals  and 
Allan  Ramsay  and  Burns— Pope  and  Philips 21 

CHAPTER  III 

pope — continued 

"Essay  on  Criticism" — Supposed  tyranny  of  Pope — Attitude  of 
Pope,  Gray,  etc.,  toward  classical  tradition — Review  of  theories 
accounting  for  the  poetic  sterility  of  the  eighteenth  century  .      35 

CHAPTER  IV 

pope — continued 

Influence  of  ideas  on  poetry — Spirit  of  the  age— Influence  of 

society  on  Pope— Gay's  ballads     .     .    .... 47 

CHAPTER  V 

A    GROUP   OF   EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY  POETS 

Thomson— Early  life — Descriptive  poetry  generally — "Winter" — 

Thomson's  position  in  poetry — Dyer  and  Somerville  ....      58 


VI  CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  VI 

pope— continued 

PAGE 

As  a  satirist  and  moralist — Failure  in  epic  poetry — "The  Dun- 

ciad  "—"  Essay  on  Man  " 72 

CHAPTER  VII 

POETRY   BETWEEN    POPE   AND   COWPER 

Glover—  Johnson — Collins — The  poet  and  the  orator — Gray       .     .      86 

CHAPTER  VIII 

DECLINE  OF  POETRY — THE  NOVEL, 

Walpole's  criticism — Why  the  want  of  poetry  was  not  felt — Diary 
of  a  lady  of  quality — Rise  of  the  novel—"  Pamela  " — Connec- 
tion with  magazine  literature — Fielding— historical  novels — 
"  The  Castle  of  Otranto  " 99 

CHAPTER  IX 

the  novel — continued 

Influence  of  Percy's  "  Reliques  "  and  Ossian— Miss  Burney  and  the 

lady  novelists 114 

CHAPTER  X 

THE   NEW   POETRY 

Cowper— His  alleged  revolution  of  poetry 129 

CHAPTER  XI 

SCOTTISH   POETRY  IN   THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY 

The  elevation  of  a  dialect  into  a  literary  language— Influence  of 
old  ballads— Watson's  "  Collection  "—Allan  Ramsay— The  Easy 
Club— "The  Gentle  Shepherd"— Song-writers— Skinner, 
etc. — Fergusson — Burns       146 

CHAPTER  XII 

WORDSWORTH 

Connection    with    previous    poetry— Sketch    of    life— "  Lyrical 

Ballads" 164 

CHAPTER  XIII 

wordsworth — continued 
"  The  Idiot  Boy  "—Prose  v.  Poetry— Coleridge  on  Wordsworth     .     182 


CONTENTS  Vll 

CHAPTER  XIV 

PAGE 
WORDSWORTH  (continued)— COLERIDGE— SODTHEY 199 

CHAPTER  XV 

CAMPBELL — MOORE 

Campbell— "  Pleasures  of  Hope  "—Thomas  Moore— The  last  of  the 
Joculators — Moore's  social  environment — His  jocose  and 
maudlin  veins 217 

CHAPTER  XVI 

SCOTT 

Influence  of  old  ballads— Summary  of  life— Poems 235 

CHAPTER  XVII 

BYRON 

Summary  of  life — Popular  identification  of  the  poet  with  his  crea- 
tions—" English  Bards  and  Scotch  Reviewers  " 253 

CHAPTER  XVIII 

NOVELISTS  FROM  MRS.  RADCLIFFE  TO  BDLWER  LYTTON 

Sterne — Miss  Edgeworth— Hannah  More — Jane  Austen — "  Waver- 
ley"— Miss  Mitford— Mrs.  Shelley— " Vivian  Grey"— "Pel- 
ham"     275 

CHAPTER  XIX 

SHELLEY  AND   KEATS 

Shelley — Various  conceptions  of  the  poet — Character — Keats — The 
reviewers — Characteristics  of  his  poetry — "Endymion"  and 
"Hyperion" 292 

SUPPLEMENT 

I.      MR.    COURTHOPE'S   BIOGRAPHY   OF   POPE 307 

II.      THE   SUPPOSED   TYRANNY   OF   POPE 326 

III.      THE  HISTORICAL  RELATIONSHIPS   OF  BURNS 343 


BIOGRAPHICAL    INTRODUCTION 


In  the  year  1890  I  asked  Professor  Minto  to 
contribute  a  volume  on  "  Logic,  Inductive  and 
Deductive,"  to  the  series  of  "  University  Man- 
uals ' '  which  I  had  organized  some  time  previously, 
and  was  then  editing.  It  was  not  completed  till 
shortly  before  his  death,  but  the  proof  had  been 
revised  by  himself  in  all  its  details;  and  it 
seemed  only  loyal  to  his  memory  to  send  it  to  the 
press  in  the  exact  form  in  which  he  left  it. 

It  has  now  fallen  to  me  to  edit  a  volume  of 
his  Lectures  on  the  Literature  of  the  Georgian 
Period ;  and,  although  they  would  have  been 
greatly  altered  and  recast  had  he  lived  to  see 
them  through  the  press,  it  is  now  inexpedient  to 
do  more  than  correct  clerical  errors  in  transcrip- 
tion. Mr.  Lobban, — who  acted  as  Professor  Min- 
to's  assistant  for  some  time,  and  whose  estimate 
of  his  master  will  be  found  in  a  later  page, — has 
been  good  enough  to  go  over  these  Lectures  with 
the  same  end  in  view. 

At  the  request  of  Mrs.  Minto  I  agreed  to  edit 
this  book,  and  to  write  a  brief  introductory 
sketch  of  my  late  friend.  We  differed  on  many 
points, — philosophical,  literary, political,  artistic, 
and  social, — but  I  never  knew  any  man  with 
whom  recognized  differences  counted  for  less,  so 
far  as  personal  esteem  was  concerned.     Indeed, 


X  BIOGKAPHICAL   INTRODUCTION 

our  differences  enhanced  my  regard  for  him 
every  time  we  met. 

He  was  not  only  the  most  chivalrous  of  intel- 
lectual opponents,  but  the  most  appreciative  ; 
and  he  had  the  rare  gift  of  presenting  to  those 
who  differed  from  him  the  very  doctrine  from 
which  they  dissented,  and  the  kernel  of  the  posi- 
tion from  which  they  stood  aloof,  in  a  non-con- 
troversial and  attractive  manner. 

I  have  never  known  a  more  genial,  generous,  or 
upright  man  than  Professor  Minto.  He  never 
alluded  to  the  points  on  which  men  differed  from 
him  in  reference  to  ultimata,  as  expressed  in 
their  published  writings  ;  and,  so  far  as  friendly 
intercourse  was  concerned,  these  differences  were 
as  though  they  were  not.  He  instinctively  met 
every  one  on  his  own  level,  sympathetically  ap- 
preciating truth  and  excellence  wherever  he 
found  them.  This  characteristic  came  out  most 
notably  in  his  comments  on  those  who  had  mis- 
construed, and  even  opposed,  him.  I  never  heard 
him  say  an  unkind  word  of  any  opponent. 

The  first  occasion  on  which  we  met  was  at  a 
University  Extension  Conference  which  was 
being  held  in  Glasgow,  and  to  which  those  repre- 
sentatives of  the  four  Scottish  Universities  who 
had  interested  themselves  in  the  work  as  organ- 
izers or  secretaries,  etc.,  were  invited.  There 
was  one  person  in  the  room  whom  I  did  not  know  ; 
and  he  seemed  to  know  no  one  present  from 
Edinburgh,  Glasgow,  or  St.  Andrews.  But,  ob- 
serving this  silent  man  with  a  noticeable  coun- 
tenance sitting  in  the  background  and  in  a  corner 
of  the  room,  I  went  up  to  him  and  asked  him 
what  University  he  represented.     As  soon  as  he 


BIOGRAPHICAL    INTRODUCTION  XI 

had  introduced  himself  lie  was  asked  to  help  in 
the  organization  of  a  comprehensive  plan  of 
University  Extension  for  Scotland  at  large.  Ab- 
erdeen had,  up  to  that  time,  taken  no  active  part 
in  the  movement ;  and  Professor  Minto  was  the 
first  to  interest  himself  in  it,  which  he  did  with 
much  ardor,  offering  many  important  sugges- 
tions. He  came  to  St.  Andrews  to  discuss  that 
and  other  things  with  me,  and  soon  became  an 
intimate  friend. 

I  can  never  forget  the  days  he  spent  at  Edge- 
cliffe  and  my  repeated  visits  to  him  afterward 
at  Aberdeen,  our  talks  on  Philosophy  and  Liter- 
ature— far  beyond  the  summer  night  and  into 
early  morning — in  his  house  at  Westfield  Terrace, 
our  golf  matches  on  the  Links,  and  social  inter- 
course with  friends  at  the  Club  or  in  his  most 
genial  home. 

As  I  was  a  friend  of  his  later  years  it  seemed 
appropriate  to  follow  the  plan  which  I  pursued 
in  the  case  of  the  late  Principal  Shairp  of  St. 
Andrews,  and  to  place  together  a  series  of  pho- 
tographic sketches — taken  from  opposite  points 
of  view — of  the  character,  genius,  and  career  of  a 
remarkable  man,  by  his  earlier  friends  and  more 
intimate  pupils.  These  tributes  have  been  ren- 
dered spontaneously,  and  given  very  cordially. 

I  do  not  feel  it  incumbent  on  me  to  characterize 
his  work  in  Philosophy,  or  his  contributions  to 
Literature,  in  detail.  It  will  suffice  to  record  one 
or  two  things  which  were  written  before  these 
admirable  character-sketches  by  others  reached 
me. 

I  consider  it  not  the  least  merit  in  Professor 
Minto' s  career  that,  while  a  man  of  letters  par 


Xll  BIOGKAPHICAL   INTRODUCTION 

excellence^ — and  for  many  years  diverted  from 
Philosophy  to  Literature  by  his  work  as  a  Jour- 
nalist, and  a  critic  of  men  and  public  measures, — 
he  succeeded,  during  his  tenure  of  it,  in  making 
the  Aberdeen  Chair,  with  its  dual  claims,  quite 
as  distinguished  in  the  department  of  Philosophy 
as  in  that  of  Literature.  All  students  bear  wit- 
ness to  this.  His  book  on  "  Logic,  Inductive  and 
Deductive,"  is  as  original  and  bright  as  that  of 
any  writer  on  the  subject  in  Great  Britain  during 
the  last  quarter  of  a  century.  In  all  probability 
his  previous  life  as  a  journalist  not  only  con- 
firmed that  rare  capacity  for  work  which  dis- 
tinguished him  as  an  undergraduate,  but  fitted 
him  for  popularizing  an  abstruse  subject,  and 
keeping  his  exposition  of  it  free  from  the  techni- 
calities which  have  so  often  disfigured  the  treat- 
ment of  Logic.  The  fact  that  he  had  been  no 
mean  power  in  the  literary  circles  of  the  south 
gave  a  special  weight  to  what  he  said  from  his 
academic  chair  ;  and  while  the  bejants  of  the 
north  found  that  they  had  before  them,  in  the 
English  Literature  class,  a  Teacher  of  whose 
achievements  among  his  contemporaries  it 
might  be  truly  said, — although  he  would  never 
have  said  it,  nor  thought  it,  —pars  magna  fui, 
the  students  of  Philosophy  found  that  they  were 
being  taught  by  an  original  mind,  and  not  by  a 
mere  expositor  of  school  Logic. 

A  wonderful  critic  of  his  "Logic"  has  com- 
plained of  its  "laxity  of  reference  to  Greek  writers 
and  to  modern,"  and  has  added  that  the  editor 
should  have  supplied  a  bibliography,  and  index, 
and  notes,  and  references,  etc.  He  has  even 
doubted  whether  it  should  ever  have  had  a  place  in 


BIOGRAPHICAL    INTRODUCTION  Xlll 

such  a  Series  !  But  the  ways  of  reviewers  are 
inscrutable.  To  none  of  the  authors  whom  I  asked 
to  co-operate  in  this  series  of  Manuals  was  it  a 
greater  satisfaction  to  me  to  delegate  work  than  to 
hand  over  this  volume  to  Professor  Minto  ;  and 
its  success,  both  in  this  country  and  in  America, 
has  been  marked.  It  has  a  value  of  its  own 
which  has  already  made  it  useful  in  University 
and  College  class-rooms,  being  one  of  the  freshest 
and  most  stimulating  books  which  our  British 
philosophical  literature  has  received  for  many 
years. 

As  a  contribution  to  logical  science,  its  Intro- 
duction will  probably  be  welcomed  generations 
hence  by  students  of  the  subject  when  dry-as- 
dust  logicians  are  forgotten.  To  be  taught  how 
to  escape  from  illusion  and  fallacy  of  every  kind, 
so  as  to  get  into  the  light  of  reality,  is  no  small 
gain  to  the  student  of  evidence  ;  and  there  can  be 
little  doubt  that  Professor  Minto' s  book — while 
a  reflection  of  the  work  done  by  him  in  the  Logic 
class-room  of  Aberdeen  for  thirteen  years — will 
be  found  one  of  the  best  handbooks  introductory 
to  the  study  of  Philosophy  for  those  who  cannot 
resort  to  a  University,  and  for  whose  assistance 
these  Manuals  were  originally  designed. 

In  Philosophy  Minto  was  singularly  open  to 
light  from  every  quarter.  I  often  told  him  that 
he  was  more  eclectic  than  I  was.  When  discuss- 
ing the  ideal  and  the  real  in  Philosophy  or  in 
Art,  he  always  proved  himself  one  of  the  most 
fair-minded  of  men,  a  reconciler  of  differences, 
and  as  ready  to  recognize  merit  from  the  most 
opposite  quarters  as  any  disciple  of  the  school 
of  a  priori  thought. 


XIV  BIOGRAPHICAL    INTRODUCTION 

The  range  of  his  knowledge  and  culture  was 
almost  encyclopaedic,  as  was  that  of  his  friend 
and  rival  Robertson  Smith  ;  so  that,  like  the  late 
Professor  Trail  of  Edinburgh — editor  of  the  sev- 
enth edition  of  the"  Encyclopaedia  Britannica"  — 
he  was  probably  the  only  man  in  the  University 
who  could  have  been  trusted  on  an  emergency  to 
conduct  the  class  of  any  one  of  his  colleagues  if 
he  were  accidentally  laid  aside  from  duty. 

It  is  a  noteworthy  circumstance  that,  when  it 
was  finally  determined  to  separate  the  subjects  of 
Logic  and  Literature  in  the  University  of  Aber- 
deen, a  memorial  was  addressed  to  Professor 
Minto,  signed  by  350  of  his  former  pupils,  asking 
him  to  accept  the  Chalmers  Chair  of  English 
Literature. 

The  lectures  published  in  this  volume,  which 
have  been  printed  from  Professor  Minto' s  own 
MSS.,  are  a  very  inadequate  index  of  the  extent 
of  his  knowledge,  or  his  critical  insight  into  the 
more  delicate  problems  which  arise  in  the  study 
of  English  Literature  ;  but,  as  he  meant  to  recast 
them  with  a  view  to  publication,  they  are  sent 
forth  in  the  belief  that  they  contain  literary 
judgments  which  he  would  himself  have  ratified 
in  any  subsequent  work.  At  the  same  time,  I 
believe  that  there  are  articles  of  William  Minto' s, 
I  should  not  say  buried,  but — for  the  mass  of 
readers — lost,  in  the  "Encyclopaedia Britannica," 
Tlie  Nineteenth  Century,  and  other  magazines, 
which,  in  their  critical  vision,  their  wise  insight, 
and  felicitous  appraisal  of  authors  little  known 
(or  at  least  little  read),  are  greatly  superior  to 
those  put  together  in  this  volume  for  the  first 
time.     There  are  papers  on  Wordsworth,   and 


BIOGRAPHICAL    INTRODUCTION  XV 

other  magnates  in  our  great  English  hierarchy, 
which  will  be  found  as  valuable  to  posterity  as 
the  critical  notices  of  any  of  our  modern  re- 
viewers. In  addition  there  are  numerous  Intro- 
ductory Lectures  delivered  to  his  class, — such  as 
those  on  "The  English  Language,"  on  "The 
Usefulness  of  Plodding,"  on  "Industry,"  and 
others  delivered  to  literary  societies  in  the  north  ; 
that  on  "K.,  B.,  and  Q.,"  or  three  new  novel- 
ists (they  were  Kipling,  Barrie,  and  Quiller- 
Couch), — which  would  adorn  another  volume  of 
his,  remains. 

As  Minto's  knowledge  was  not  derived  from 
secondary  sources,  his  criticism  was  invariably 
at  first  hand.  I  was  often  struck  with  his 
knowledge  of  out-of-the-way  authors.  He  could 
quote  "The  Day's  Estival "  as  readily  as  he 
showed  his  knowledge  of  the  writings  of  Thomas, 
ex  Albiis.  These  delightful  days  at  Aberdeen, 
when — after  a  round  of  the  Links — we  used  to 
watch  the  fleet  of  boats  going  out  from  the  har- 
bor to  the  herring  fishing,  and  talk  of  Meta- 
physics or  of  Literature,  vividly  recall  to  me 
how  glad  Minto  was  to  be  ultimately  relieved 
from  what  became — to  a  temperament  like  his — 
the  drudgery  of  editorship.  I  nevertheless  be- 
lieve that  his  training  in  the  editorial  chair, 
and  his  varied  literary  work  in  London,  devel- 
oped his  unique  fitness  for  the  work  he  did  at 
the  University.  It  prevented  him  from  ever 
being  pedantic.  It  gave  simplicity,  piquancy, 
and  diversity  to  his  style  ;  and  to  it  is  greatly 
owing  the  fact  that,  in  all  his  subsequent  exposi- 
tions of  the  abstruser  matters  of  Philosophy,  he 
was  untechnical,  and  even  vernacular. 


XVI  BIOGRAPHICAL    INTRODUCTION 

In  the  following  brief  sketch  of  his  life  I  avail 
myself  of  notes  derived  from  several  quarters. 

William  Minto  was  born  at  Nether  Auchin- 
toul,  Alford,  on  the  10th  of  October,  1845,  the 
farm  then  occupied  by  his  father.  He  was  sent 
to  Gallowhill  school,  near  Alford,  which  he  left 
in  May,  1854,  going  for  six  months  to  the  parish 
school  of  Tough.  In  November,  1854,  his  father 
entered  upon  the  tenancy  of  the  farm  of  Little- 
mill,  Auchterless,  and  the  son  was  sent  to  a 
private  school  at  Bruckhills  in  the  neighborhood. 
Here  he  remained  for  two  years,  after  which  he 
went  for  a  year  to  the  Episcopal  school  at  Fisher- 
ford,  Culsalmond.  In  1857  his  parents  removed 
to  Huntly,  where  William  was  taught  in  the 
Gordon  Schools  under  a  very  able  master,  the 
Rev.  John  Macdonald,  who  gave  him  a  thorough 
training  in  classics  as  a  preparation  for  the  bur- 
sary competition  at  the  University  of  Aberdeen. 
He  cherished  the  memory  of  this  teacher  to  the 
last,  entertaining  for  him  the  greatest  admiration 
and  regard. 

Before  giving  an  outline  of  his  College  career 
an  explanation  of  the  constant  race  between  him 
and  the  late  Robertson  Smith,  the  distinguished 
Professor  of  Arabic  at  Cambridge,  is  desirable. 
He  went  to  College  in  the  winter  of  1861-62,  at 
the  age  of  sixteen,  his  means  of  preparation 
being  such  as  already  indicated.  Robertson 
Smith  was  two  years  his  senior ;  and,  by  his 
father's  arrangement  as  a  matter  of  policy,  was 
kept  at  home  studying  to  the  very  utmost  under 
himself,  he  being  one  of  the  best  teachers  of  the 
day,  accomplished  both  in  mathematics  and  clas- 
sics.    The  consequence  was  that  Smith  carried 


BIOGRAPHICAL   INTRODUCTION  XVU 

off  the  first  bursary  with  comparative  ease,  his 
Latin  version  being  perfect,  sine  errore,  in  every 
respect — probably  as  good  a  version  as  the  clas- 
sical master  could  have  produced.  Minto,  with 
his  inferior  advantages,  was  able  to  carry  off  the 
Moir  bursary  of  fifteen  pounds.  The  disparity  in 
years  and  means  of  training  made  the  start  of  the 
two  comrjetitors  necessarily  unequal ;  and  it  was 
by  an  extraordinary  strain  of  application  that 
Minto  was  able,  in  a  very  short  time,  to  equal,  and 
even  to  surpass,  Robertson  Smith  in  some  of  the 
subjects.  At  the  end  of  the  first  year  his  work 
had  been  such  that  he  took  the  eighth  prize  in 
Latin,  and  the  second  in  Greek.  In  English  he 
only  attained  a  third  place  in  the  order  of  merit. 
Professor  Bain  writes  :  "In  the  English  class 
one  incident  occurred  which  constituted  the  first 
occasion  of  my  taking  notice  of  his  personality. 
I  began  in  that  year  the  system  of  setting  in 
writing  two  essays  a  week,  and  engaged  an  as- 
sistant to  read  them.  The  only  person  that  I 
could  find  as  an  assistant  to  begin  with,  before  I 
got  advanced  pupils  of  my  own,  was  an  assistant 
librarian  in  the  College.  The  out-of-door  essays 
I  made  him  examine  and  value,  and  also  indicate 
errors,  so  that  they  might  be  returned.  After 
giving  them  back  one  day  Minto  came  up  to 
me  at  the  end  of  the  hour,  and  showed  me  his 
paper  with  some  red  ink  marks  under  portions 
of  it,  which  was  the  mode  of  indicating  some 
error  or  want  of  correctness.  He  asked  me  to 
tell  him  what  that  meant.  I  looked  at  it,  and  I 
found  that  there  was  really  nothing  to  correct  in 
the  matter  at  all  ;  and  the  incident  showed  me 
that  the  assistant  was  not  to  be  trusted  with  the 


XV111  BIOGRAPHICAL   INTRODUCTION 

function  of  indicating  errors,  so  as  to  enable  me 
to  return  the  essays  ;  and  from  that  time  forward 
I  ceased  the  practice." 

In  the  Honors  examinations  Minto  had  a  first 
in  Classics,  a  second  in  Mental  Philosophy,  and 
a  second  in  Mathematical  Science — a  triple 
honor,  never  before  or  since  accomplished.  As 
prizes  he  carried  off  the  Simpson  in  Greek  and 
the  Boxhill  in  Mathematics ;  he  also  obtained 
the  Hutton  prize  (which  was  awarded  for  dis- 
tinction both  in  Classics  and  in  Philosophy) — 
the  total  money  value  of  the  prizes  being  £110. 

He  graduated  as  Master  of  Arts  in  1865,  and 
afterward  obtained  the  Ferguson  scholarship  in 
Classics,  open  to  graduates  of  all  the  Scottish 
Universities. 

In  the  session  of  1865-66  he  attended  the  Di- 
vinity Hall,  and  in  the  summer  of  1866  went  to 
Merton  College,  Oxford,  where  he  obtained  an 
exhibition  of  eighty  pounds. 

His  experience  at  Oxford  seemed  to  impress 
him  with  the  inexpediency  of  pursuing  his 
studies  there,  and  he  resolved  to  leave  it  at  the 
end  of  the  year,  which  he  did,  without  taking 
the  Oxford  degree.  He  seemed  to  think  that  to 
wait  for  a  Fellowship  at  Merton  would  not  be  so 
advantageous  to  him  as  to  go  south  to  the  me- 
tropolis, or  to  return  to  Scotland. 

In  the  autumn  of  1867  he  was  undecided  as  to 
his  future ;  but,  owing  to  his  distinction  in 
Science,  as  well  as  in  Classics  and  Philosophy,  an 
offer  was  made  to  him  by  Mr.  David  Thomson,  the 
Professor  of  Natural  Philosophy  in  Aberdeen,  to 
become  his  endowed  assistant — an  office  to  which 
a  salary  of  one  hundred  pounds  a  year  was  at- 


BIOGRAPHICAL   INTRODUCTION  XIX 

tached.  The  engagement  seemed  to  give  satisfac- 
tion to  both  parties, and  he  entered  upon  his  duties 
in  the  following  November.  The  only  thing  doubt- 
ful was  whether  he  had  that  sort  of  handicraft 
skill  required  in  an  assistant  who  had  to  take 
part  in  experimental  work,  and  that,  of  course, 
remained  to  be  tested.  The  engagement,  how- 
ever, came  to  an  abrupt  termination  in  December, 
the  occasion  being  Minto's  refusal  to  take  part 
in  the  experiment  of  subjecting  himself  to  an 
electric  shock,  so  as  to  excite  the  laughter  of  the 
students,  which  he  considered  derogatory  to  his 
position  as  an  assistant.  It  is  unnecessary  to 
discuss  the  details  of  this  unfortunate  affair 
further  than  to  say  that  he  objected,  and  rightly, 
"to  be  made  part  and  parcel  of  the  class  appa- 
ratus." When  released  from  this  post  he  was 
appointed  temporarily  by  Professor  Bain  as  his 
English  class  assistant,  and  to  give  various  aid  in 
connection  with  certain  books  which  he  then  had 
in  hand.  With  this  occupation  Minto  began  his 
volume  on  "  English  Prose  Composition,"  which 
he  wrote  exclusively  in  Aberdeen  during  the 
course  of  the  next  three  years,  having  the  re- 
sources of  the  University  library  at  his  command 
for  the  purpose.     The  work  appeared  in  1872. 

During  the  four  years  which  he  now  spent  at 
Aberdeen  Minto  was  active  in  a  variety  of  ways 
in  connection  with  the  University,  although  not 
one  of  its  recognized  officials.  He  took  a  note- 
worthy part  in  the  work  of  the  University  Liter- 
ary Society,  which  was  founded  in  1871,  and  of 
which  he  was  elected  president  in  1872.  He  was 
also  an  active  organizer  in  rectorial  contests,  al- 
though he  had  not  himself  a  vote.     The  election 


XX  BIOGRAPHICAL   INTRODUCTION 

which  occurred  during  his  stay  in  Aberdeen  re- 
sulted in  the  return  of  Mountstuart  Grant  Duff 
■  for  the  second  time  in  1869.  There  was  a  close 
contest.  The  majority  was  a  very  narrow  one, — 
only  twelve, — indeed,  it  was  found  that  there  was 
a  tie  of  Nations,  and  the  Duke  of  Richmond  and 
Gordon  gave  the  casting  vote  in  favor  of  Sir 
William  Maxwell,  who,  seeing  there  was  dissatis- 
faction with  the  mode  in  which  the  election  had 
been  made,  magnanimously  declined  to  accept 
office,  and  allowed  Mr.  Grant  Duff  to  be  elected. 
Minto's  influence  was  very  marked  and  power- 
ful, so  much  so  that  but  for  him  Mr.  Grant  Duff 
would  have  failed. 

In  1872  there  was  a  vacancy  in  the  representa- 
tion of  the  University  Council  in  the  Court,  and 
it  was  again  due  to  his  untiring  energy  that  the 
Rev.  John  Christie,  minister  of  Kildrummy,  was 
elected. 

In  1872  the  examinership  in  Mental  Philosophy 
at  Aberdeen  became  vacant,  and  Minto  became  a 
candidate.  His  friends  in  the  Court  were  the 
Rector,  the  Rector's  Assessor,  and  the  Assessor 
to  the  General  Council,  all  of  whom  may  be  said 
to  have  owed  their  standing  to  his  exertions  in 
their  behalf  at  the  different  elections.  His  secur- 
ing the  appointment  as  Examiner  was  an  impor- 
tant step  in  his  future  career,  being  the  beginning 
of  his  systematic  studies  in  Philosophy,  while  his 
other  work  was  more  exclusively  in  connection 
with  English  Literature. 

In  the  following  year  (1873)  he  left  Aberdeen, 
and  went  up  to  London  to  engage  in  literary 
work.  He  obtained  a  post  on  TJie  Examiner 
newspaper,  and  in  its  columns  he  wrote,  with 


BIOGRAPHICAL  INTRODUCTION  XXI 

special  force  and  clearness,  on  John  Stnart  Mill, 
on  the  occasion  of  his  death  in  May,  1873.  His 
article  was  one  of  a  series  of  character-sketches 
on  Mill,  to  which  Herbert  Spencer,  Mr.  Frederick 
Harrison,  Professors  Henry  Fawcett  and  Cairns 
also  contributed.  Later  in  that  year  T7ie  Ex- 
aminer was  purchased  by  Mr.  Peter  Taylor,  the 
Radical  Member  of  Parliament  for  Leicester.  Mr. 
Minto  was  selected  as  literary  editor,  and  in  1874  as 
editor-in-chief.  The  Examiner  had  been  started 
by  Leigh  Hunt  in  the  earlier  years  of  the  present 
century.  To  it  Charles  Lamb,  Shelley,  Hazlitt, 
Haydon,  and  John  Forster  had  contributed.  It 
was  edited  for  some  time  by  M.  Albany  Fon- 
blanque  ;  but  it  had  almost  failed  about  the  year 
1870,  when  it  was  revived  as  the  organ  of  philo- 
sophical Radicalism.  It  was,  however,  a  literary 
as  well  as  a  political  journal  ;  and  Mr.  Minto 
had  very  able  coadjutors  in  both  departments, 
such  men  as  Mr.  John  MacDonnell  and  Mr. 
William  A.  Hunter  being  among  them.  With 
all  its  ability,  however,  The  Examiner  did  not 
succeed.  It  had  a  very  formidable  rival  in  the 
ablest  of  all  the  weekly  papers  of  Great  Britain — 
The  Spectator.  Mr.  Taylor  sold  the  property  to 
Lord  Rosebery,  Mr.  Minto  remaining  co-editor 
along  with  Mr.  Robert  Williams  until  1878.  When 
the  paper  was  finally  discontinued  in  1880,  Minto 
turned  to  purely  political  writing  in  The  Daily 
News.  He  afterward  wrote  in  The  Pall  Mall 
Gazette  (under  the  editorship  of  Mr.  John  Mor- 
ley),  to  which  newspaper  he  was  a  regular  con- 
tributor until  he  left  London.  While  living  as  a 
journalist  in  London  Minto  took  a  prominent 
part  in  political  controversy,  especially  in  con- 


XX11  BIOGRAPHICAL    INTRODUCTION 


nection  with  England's  relations  to  the  East,  and 
the  war  in  Afghanistan.  He  was  the  first  to  use 
a  term  which  soon  became  a  current  coin  in 
political  writing — the  term  "jingo."  As  he 
once  told  his  students  :  "  I  am  under  the  impres- 
sion that  I  was  the  first  to  give  the  currency  of 
respectable  print  to  the  chorus  of  the  song,  '  We 
don't  want  to  fight,  but,  by  Jingo,  if  we  do,'  and 
so  forth,"  which  was  first  made  use  of  in  an  edi- 
torial article  in  The  Daily  News. 

During  his  seven  years  in  the  metropolis  his 
literary,  other  than  newspaper,  work  resulted  in 
the  publication  of  "Characteristics  of  English 
Poets"  in  1874,  and  "Defoe,"  in  the  English 
Men  of  Letters  Series,  in  1879,  besides  miscella- 
neous contributions  to  various  periodicals,  such  as 
The  Nineteenth  Century,  The  Fortnightly  Re- 
view, Macmillan,  Blackwood,  and  The  English 
Illustrated  Magazine.  It  may  be  noted  that 
Mr.  Edmund  Gosse  was,  for  a  time,  the  sub- 
editor of  The  Examiner,  and  that  Minto  was  the 
first  to  persuade  Mr.  Theodore  Watts  to  devote 
himself  to  literature. 

He  was  early  engaged  by  Professor  Thomas 
Spenser  Baynes,  the  late  editor  of  the  "  Encyclo- 
pedia Britannica,"  to  contribute  to  its  pages,  and 
his  contributions  are  to  be  found  in  most  of  the 
volumes  of  that  Encyclopaedia.  In  alphabetical 
order  they  were  as  follows :  Byron,  Chaucer, 
Dickens,  Dryden,  Fielding,  Lytton,  Mandeville, 
J.  S.  Mill,  Minstrel,  Moore,  Poe,  Pope,  Reade, 
Scott,  Sheridan,  Sydney  Smith,  Smollett,  Spen- 
ser, Steele,  Sterne,  James  Thomson,  Waller, 
Izaak  Walton,  Warton,  and  Wordsworth. 

In  1880  Professor  Bain  retired  from  the  Chair 


BIOGRAPHICAL   INTRODUCTION  XXlll 

of  Logic  and  English  Literature  in  the  University 
of  Aberdeen,  and  Minto  became  his  successor. 
In  that  year  he  married  Miss  Cornelia  Griffiths, 
daughter  of  the  Rector  of  Swindon,  in  Glouces- 
tershire. When  called  to  Aberdeen  he  devoted 
himself  with  rare  assiduity  to  both  branches  of 
his  Chair,  although  it  was  evident  that  the 
English  section  was  what  he  liked  best,  and  what 
he  most  excelled  in.  During  the  thirteen  years 
that  he  held  office  in  the  University  his  literary 
activity  was  great.  He  published  three  romances  : 
"The  Crack  of  Doom,"  which  appeared  first  in 
Blackwood' s  Magazine  in  1886,  and  was  repub- 
lished in  three  volumes  in  1886  ;  "The  Mediation 
of  Ralph  Hardelot,"  contributed  to  The  English 
Illustrated  Magazine,  and  published  in  book 
form  in  1888 ;  and  "  Was  She  Good  or  Bad  \ "  in 
1889.  In  1886  he  brought  out  an  admirable  edi- 
tion of  Scott's  "Lay  of  the  Last  Minstrel"  for 
the  Clarendon  Press,  with  notes,  and  in  1891  an 
edition  of  "  The  Lady  of  the  Lake."  In  1887  he 
edited  a  complete  edition  of  Sir  Walter's  Poems 
for  Messrs.  A.  &  C.  Black.  During  his  later  years 
in  Aberdeen  he  was  also  a  frequent  contributor 
to  several  of  the  London  literary  weeklies,  not- 
ably to  The  Bookman.  The  posthumous  volume 
on  "  Logic,"  already  referred  to,  contains  the  best 
part  of  his  teaching  in  the  Philosophical  class- 
room of  the  University  of  Aberdeen. 
In  the  Preface  to  that  work  he  wrote  : 

In  this  little  treatise  two  things  are  attempted  that 
at  first  might  appear  incompatible.  One  of  them  is  to 
put  the  study  of  logical  formulae  on  a  historical  basis. 
Strangely  enough,  the  scientific    evolution    of    logical 


Xxiv  BIOGRAPHICAL   INTRODUCTION 

forms  is  a  bit  of  history  that  still  awaits  the  zeal  and 
genius  of  some  great  scholar.  I  have  neither  ambition 
nor  qualification  for  such  a  magnum  opus,  and  my  life 
is  already  more  than  half  spent  ;  but  the  gap  in  evo- 
lutionary research  is  so  obvious  that  doubtless  some 
younger  man  is  now  at  work  in  the  field  unknown  to  me. 
All  that  I  can  hope  to  do  is  to  act  as  a  humble  pioneer 
according  to  my  imperfect  lights.  Even  the  little  I 
have  done  represents  work  begun  more  than  twenty 
years  ago,  aud  continuously  pursued  for  the  last  twelve 
years  during  a  considerable  portion  of  my  time. 

The  other  aim,  which  might  at  first  appear  inconsist- 
ent with  this,  is  to  increase  the  power  of  Logic  as  a 
practical  discipline.  The  main  purpose  of  this  practical 
science,  or  scientific  art,  is  conceived  to  be  the  organi- 
zation of  reason  against  error,  and  error  in  its  various 
kinds  is  made  the  basis  of  the  division  of  the  subject. 
To  carry  out  this  practical  aim  along  with  the  historical 
one  is  not  hopeless,  because  throughout  its  long  history 
Logic  has  been  a  practical  science  ;  and,  as  I  have  tried 
to  show  at  some  length  in  introductory  chapters,  has 
concerned  itself  at  different  periods  with  the  risks  of 
error  peculiar  to  each. 

An  earlier  work,  issued  the  year  before  he  died, 
the  "Autobiographical  Notes  of  the  Life  of 
William  Bell  Scott,"  is  a  book  of  great  value,  as 
bearing  on  a  wide  circle  of  writers  in  Literature 
and  Art,  The  varied  information  there  contained 
as  to  such  men  as  David  Scott,  Dante  Rossetti, 
Samuel  Brown,  Holman  Hunt,  Thomas  Woolner, 
Carlyle,  and  others,  is  of  the  highest  literary 
importance. 

Minto's  health  was  weakened  before  1890.  He 
often  suffered  from  asthma,  and  in  1891  he  was 
induced  to  try  the  effect  of  a  sea  voyage  in  the 


BIOGRAPHICAL  INTRODUCTION  XXV 

Mediterranean,  which  refreshed  him  for  a  time. 
His  academic  and  literary  activity  knew  no 
intermission  till  he  finally  succumbed  to  a  com- 
plication of  ailments  on  the  1st  of  March,  1893. 
Had  he  survived  to  see,  and  to  profit  by,  the 
changes  introduced  by  the  University  Commis- 
sion into  the  curriculum  of  study  at  Aberdeen, 
he  would  have  found  in  the  new  Chair  of  English 
a  field  for  his  energies,  in  which  he  would  have 
probably  enriched  the  literature  of  his  country 
in  many  ways.  With  a  wide  knowledge  of 
philosophy,  and  a  thoroughgoing  philosophic 
discipline  behind,  he  might  have  been  expected 
to  do  as  much  as  any  of  his  contemporaries  to 
advance  the  study  of  English  in  the  land  of  his 
birth,  and  in  his  own  alma  mater,  while  the 
northern  University  would  have  felt  his  power 
in  the  consideration  of  all  matters  of  academic 

policy. 

Minto's  death,  although  not  altogether  unex- 
pected, was  a  shock,  not  only  to  the  city  of 
Aberdeen,  but  to  the  country  at  large.  Every 
Professor  in  the  University  on  hearing  of  it 
made  a  sympathetic  allusion  to  their  common 
loss,  and  dismissed  his  class  for  the  day.  I  ex- 
tract the  following  account  of  his  funeral  from  a 
local  journal : 

A  more  inspiring  ceremonial,  and  one  that  brought 
from  their  homes  a  more  than  usually  large  gathering 
of  the  public,  of  all  ranks,  has  not  been  witnessed  in 
Aberdeen  than  that  which  attended  the  funeral  of  Pro- 
fessor Minto  yesterday.  The  obsequies  were  of  a  pub- 
lic character,  and  among  the  varied  representatives  that 
followed  the  mournful  procession  from  Marischal  College 


XXVI  BIOGRAPHICAL   INTRODUCTION 

to  Allanvale  Cemetery  there  was  a  very  large  number 
of  the  deceased  Professor's  academical  and  other 
friends.  The  plate  bore  the  inscription,  "  William 
Minto,  born  Oct.  10th,  1845,  died  March  1st,  1893."  The 
coffin  was  carried  to  the  grave  on  the  shoulders  of  four 
shore  porters.  Long  before  the  procession  started  from 
Marischal  College  both  sides  of  Union  Street  were 
densely  lined  with  the  populace,  who  waited  patiently 
for  nearly  an  hour  to  catch  a  last  glimpse  of  the  remains 
being  carried  to  the  grave.  Funeral  service  was  con- 
ducted in  the  Upper  and  Lower  Halls,  the  professors, 
students,  and  varied  University  bodies  assembling.  The 
shop  and  dwelling-house  window-blinds  along  the 
streets  through  which  the  procession  passed  were  drawn 
down,  and  as  the  coffin  passed  the  hats  of  spectators 
were  respectfully  raised  all  along  the  route.  The 
weather  was  warm, — very  un-March-like, — and  at  in- 
tervals a  bright  sun  shone,  revealing  the  early  breath 
of  spring.  As  the  cortege  moved  through  the  streets 
the  deep  and  solemn  note  of  Victoria  pealed  at  regular 
intervals  from  the  tower  of  St.  Nicholas'  steeple. 

Mr.  W.  Robertson  Nicoll,  the  editor  of  The 
.Bookman  and  other  papers,  sends  me  the  follow- 
ing most  appreciative  paper : 

Minto  was  one  of  the  most  brilliant  and  industrious 
students  Aberdeen  University  has  ever  known.  He 
was  one  of  three  concerning  whom  a  Professor  said 
that  none  of  them  would  ever  see  fifty.  Their  consti- 
tutions were  not  robust,  and  they  were  of  eager,  un- 
resting temperament. 

The  natural  thing  for  Minto  would  have  been  to 
enter  at  an  English  University,  and  he  made  the  attempt. 
But  it  did  not  suit  him,  and  after  a  short  trial  he  also 
gave  up  Divinity.  It  was  a  bold  step  in  these  days  to 
take  up  literature  as  a  profession,  but,  having  made  up 


BIOGRAPHICAL   INTRODUCTION  XXV11 

his  mind,  he  prepared  himself  with  business-like  thor- 
oughness. He  wrote  articles  and  reviews  in  one  of  the 
Aberdeen  newspapers  [The  Herald).  Here,  perhaps 
for  the  only  time  in  his  life,  he  occasionally  gave  rein 
to  his  great  powers  of  sarcasm  ;  but,  for  the  most  part, 
his  criticisms  were  genial.  He  set  himself  to  write 
books  on  literary  history.  In  these  he  made  the  simple 
but  unusual  preparation  of  reading  the  authors  he  was 
to  deal  with.  The  result  is  that  his  "  Manual  "  and  his 
"  Characteristics  "  are  perhaps  the  most  thoroughly  origi- 
nal works  of  their  kind.  Minto  did  not,  in  the  first  in- 
stance, read  criticisms  of  authors  ;  he  went  to  the 
fountainhead.  In  the  case  of  some  authors, — notably 
De  Quincey, — his  research  was  of  the  most  elaborate 
kind.  At  the  time  when  his  volume  was  published 
Minto  probably  knew  more  of  De  Quincey's  work  than 
any  other  critic.  Another  study  he  took  pleasure  in 
was  that  of  Sir  Roger  de  Coverley.  He  contended  and 
proved  that  all  that  is  amiable  in  the  character  belongs 
to  Steele. 

While  diligently  occupied  at  this  work,  Minto  found 
time  to  be  president  of  the  University  Literary  Society 
— a  body  composed  of  graduates  and  other  members  of 
the  University.  As  Vice-President  I  had  many  oppor- 
tunities of  meeting  him,  and  the  association  ripened 
into  intimacy.  Like  all  who  really  knew  Minto,  I  soon 
came  to  estimate  his  character  even  above  his  abili- 
ties. I  have  never  known  so  equitable  a  mind.  Though 
a  man  of  strong  convictions  and  warm  feelings,  he  was 
pre-eminently  just,  patient,  and  generous.  He  could 
make  allowance  for  his  bitterest  opponents  ;  and  was 
quick  to  recognize  the  merits  of  those  farthest  from  him 
in  opinion.  Even  if  he  depreciated  any  man,  he  soon 
began  to  recall  redeeming  traits.  This  equitableness  of 
temper  is  what  rises  up  and  remains  to  me  at  every 
remembrance  of  Minto.  He  had  also  much  bonhomie, 
and  was  singularly  courteous  to  every  one.     In  these 


XXVlii  BIOGRAPHICAL    INTRODUCTION 

gatherings  of  students  he  was  seen  at  his  best,  and  it 
was  his  special  delight  to  encourage  and  befriend  be- 
ginners. 

When  he  went  to  edit  TJie  Examiner  his  old  friends 
in  Aberdeen  followed  his  work  with  warm  interest.  I 
am  sure  he  has  never  had  justice  done  to  his  editorial 
ability.  The  Examiner  was  in  low  water,  and  in  these 
days  new  ideas  in  journalism  were  not  favored.  Possibly 
its  politics  were  too  advanced  for  readers  of  the  class 
it  appealed  to.  But  Minto  was  in  his  way  a  great 
editor.  He  introduced  the  features  which  mark  the 
new  sixpenny  reviews — signed  articles,  stories,  sketches, 
and  miscellaneous  paragraphs.  For  new  writers  he  was 
always  on  the  outlook,  and  Mr.  Theodore  Watts  and 
Mr.  Edmund  Gosse  were  among  the  young  critics  he 
brought  forward.  Dr.  Garnett's  exquisite  criticism 
was  often  to  be  recognized.  For  the  work  of  woman 
he  had  a  warm  welcome  ;  Mrs.  Augusta  Webster  was 
one  of  many  lady  contributors.  But  the  comparative 
failure  of  the  paper  from  a  commercial  standpoint  dis- 
couraged him.  He  had  great  pleasure  in  thinking  of 
his  literary  associations  and  friendships ;  but  the  work 
of  editing  was  to  him  a  "disagreeable  business,"  and  he 
scarcely  understood  how  any  one  could  like  it. 

Of  his  career  as  a  Professor  others  will  speak.  I 
believe  he  bridged  the  gulf  which  for  long  stretched  so 
wide  between  Aberdeen  students  and  their  teachers.  It 
was  easy  to  see  that  his  heart  was  in  his  work  and  with 
his  pupils. 

In  later  years  I  saw  him  frequently.  Even  when  in 
delicate  health,  and  worried  by  controversies  not  of  his 
seeking,  he  was  what  I  had  always  known  him — un- 
alterably true  to  his  convictions,  generous  in  his  judg- 
ment of  opponents,  unwearied  in  labor,  and  eagerly 
interested  in  literature — old  and  new.  At  our  last 
meeting  he  talked  of  the  writers  who  had  influenced 
Dickens.     I  happened  to  say  that  John  Poole,  author  of 


BIOGRAPHICAL   INTRODUCTION  XXIX 

"Little  Pedlington,"  was  the  only  novelist  to  whom,  so 
far  as  I  could  see,  Dickens  owed  any  thing.  Minto  re- 
plied that  he  believed  he  could  trace  marks  of  Theodore 
Hook  in  Dickens.     He  spoke  of  the  lines  : 

"  In  Vienna's  fatal  walls 
God's  finger  touched  hini  and  he  slept," 

in  connection  with  the  remark  that  the  word  "  fatal "  is 
incongruous  with  the  sentiment  that  follows.  He  turned 
to  his  favorite  theme,  the  young  writers  of  the  day. 
Most  of  them  he  met  on  his  visits  to  London,  and 
cheered  them  with  his  cordial  praise.  For  Mr.  Barrie, 
whom  he  first  met  under  my  roof,  he  had  a  warm 
admiration,  but  I  think  he  expected  most  from  Mr. 
Quiller-Couch.  I  sent  him  Mr.  Couch's  poems  for 
review  in  The  Bookman,  and  it  was,  I  believe,  the  last 
book  read  to  him. 

Minto's  best  work  was  done  perhaps  in  literary  history 
and  criticism,  and  had  he  lived  he  would  have  given  us 
a  monumental  book  in  this  department.  Nothing,  how- 
ever, could  have  increased  the  estimate  of  his  character 
formed  by  all  who  knew  him.  The  man  himself  was 
greater  than  any  book  he  could  have  written. 

Mr.  P.  W.  Clayden,  the  editor  of  The  Daily 
News,  sends  the  following  note  of  Minto's  con- 
nection with  that  newspaper : 

I  am  a  little  surprised  to  find  how  short  his  connec- 
tion with  us  was.  His  first  article  appeared  on  the  14th 
of  August,  1878.  It  was  on  Indian  Finance.  Here  is 
the  list  of  subjects  on  which  he  wrote  in  the  first 
fortnight  : 


» 


August  14.  Indian  Finance. 

August  15.  Cyprus. 

August  16.  The  Eastern  Question. 


August  17.  India. 


XXX  BIOGRAPHICAL  INTRODUCTION 

August  20.  The  Eastern  Question. 
August  21.  The  Eastern  Question. 
August  22.  Batoum. 
August  23.  The  Eastern  Question. 
August  24.  The  Government. 
August  24.  Election  News. 

He  continued  to  write,  chiefly  on  these  subjects,  till 
1880,  and  his  last  article  in  Tlie  Daily  News  was  on  the 
20th  of  May,  1880.  He  also  wrote  some  reviews,  and 
occasional  articles  on  literary  subjects,  as  well  as  articles 
on  the  smaller  topics  which  arise  in  the  regular  course 
of  newspaper  work.  He  acted  during  nearly  the  whole 
of  this  year  and  nine  months  as  an  assistant  editor, 
attending  at  night  twice  a  week  on  evenings  on  which 
I  was  absent,  and  being  with  me  when  I  took  the 
editorship  in  Mr.  Hill's  absence.  My  impression  is  that 
he  never  took  quite  kindly  to  the  night-work.  He  was 
not  a  rapid  writer,  but  his  articles  were  distinguished 
for  the  fulness  and  accuracy  of  the  knowledge  they 
exhibited,  and  their  forcible  and  clear  argument.  I 
always  found  him  a  most  pleasant  and  trustworthy 
colleague.  One  result  of  that  connection  remains.  We 
were  wanting  some  one  to  write  leaders  on  legal  sub- 
jects, and  Minto  brought  with  him  one  day  Mr.  Herbert 
Paul,  now  M.  P.  for  South  Edinburgh.  Mr.  Paul 
showed  great  aptitude  and  capacity  for  the  work,  and 
has  been  more  and  more  intimately  associated  with  us 
ever  since.  During  the  time  of  Minto's  connection  with 
the  paper  I  was  busy  at  home  in  writing  "  England 
under  Lord  Beaconsfield,"  the  notice  of  which  in  TJie 
Daily  Neics  was  written  by  Minto.  I  find  that  my 
regular  attendance  at  the  office  at  night  was  then  three 
times  a  week,  Minto  being  there  on  the  other  three 
nights.  On  any  pressure  arising  I  went  on  extra  nights, 
and  it  was  only  on  such  nights  and  at  times  when  I  was 
editing  that  I  was   at  the  office   at   night   with   him. 


BIOGRAPHICAL    INTRODUCTION  XXXI 

After  he  suddenly  left  in  May,  1880,  we  expected  that  he 
would  come  back  again,  as  he  had  done  on  a  previous 
occasion,  but  he  did  not.  His  leaving  was  entirely  his 
own  doing,  and  we  all  much  regretted  it.  He  was  living 
then  very  near  to  me,  and  the  break  at  the  office  made 
no  break  in  our  friendship.  He  was  at  once  engaged  on 
TJie  Pall  Mall  Gazette,  and  I  saw  none  the  less  of  him. 
When  he  was  sent  to  Aberdeen  I  greatly  regretted  his 
removal  for  my  own  sake,  but  rejoiced  in  it  for  him. 
He  always  came  to  see  us  down  to  the  time  of  his  last 
visit  to  London,  and  I  always  felt,  to  the  end,  that 
warm  friendship  for  him  which  I  had  formed  during  the 
time  we  worked  together  at  The  Daily  News.  I  do  not 
think  he  was  in  his  proper  element  in  newspaper  work. 
He  was  too  fastidious  as  to  style  and  treatment, — using 
the  word  fastidious  in  its  best  sense, — and  was  not 
entirely  comfortable  in  the  sort  of  rapid  work  which  is 
required.  His  writing  was  perhaps  a  little  too  reflective 
for  a  daily  paper — I  mean  that  it  necessarily  took  rather 
more  time  to  produce  than  the  more  oratorical  and  dash- 
ing  style  of  newspaper  writing.  It  was  the  literary 
man,  the  scholar,  the  thinker,  who  was  writing,  rather 
than  the  busy  politician.  This  literary  character  of  his 
style  was  much  valued.  It  is  part  of  the  tradition  of 
The  Daily  News  to  cultivate  that  style.  In  his  political 
views  he  was  in  hearty  sympathy  with  the  paper,  though 
he  always  insisted  on  dealing  with  any  topic  on  which 
he  wrote  in  his  own  way,  very  often  an  original  way. 

The  Rev.  William  L.  Davidson  of  Bour tie,  whose 
acquaintance  I  bad  the  pleasure  of  making  at 
Minto's  house,  and  whose  contributions  to  philos- 
ophy and  literature  are  well  known,  writes  thus  : 

It  is  not  easy  to  convey  a  correct  impression  of  Pro- 
fessor Minto  to  those  who  were  not  personally  acquainted 
with  him  ;  and   those   who    were  fortunate  enough  to 


XXX11  BIOGRAPHICAL   INTRODUCTION 

enjoy  personal  intercourse  with  him  need  no  picture  of 
mine.  To  me  Minto  was  a  very  choice  friend.  Our  mu- 
tual acquaintance  dates  from  the  time  that  I  was  assist- 
ant to  Professor  Bain  in  the  English  and  Logic  classes  at 
the  University  of  Aberdeen,  and  Minto  was  associated 
with  Professor  Bain  also  in  various  literary  productions. 
Minto's  first  work — that  on  the  English  Prose  Writers — 
was  then  in  course  of  formation  ;  and  I  quite  well 
remember  the  care  and  energy  that  he  expended  on  that 
book,  and  his  intense  desire  to  render  it  worthy  of  the 
subject,  and  of  the  distinguished  master  under  whose 
inspiration  he  wrote  it.  Meanwhile,  although  literature 
claimed  his  chief  attention,  politics  had  already  begun 
to  assert  its  hold  over  him.  Even  then  he  was  pro- 
nounced in  his  opinions, — often  dogmatic  in  asserting 
them  in  the  presence  of  formidable  opposition, — and  fast 
acquiring  a  firm  grasp  of  those  principles  that  he  was, 
by  and  by,  to  apply  with  vigor  as  editor  of  Tlie  Exami- 
ner. In  University  matters  he  took  a  keen  interest ; 
and,  though  himself  a  graduate,  was  a  moving  spirit  in 
the  rectorial  elections  of  those  days.  Socially,  Minto 
was,  at  the  date  of  which  I  speak,  one  of  the  most  genial 
and  pleasant  of  companions.  lie  had  then,  and  retained 
to  the  very  close  of  his  days,  a  bonhomie  that  was 
remai'kable  ;  and  his  intense  enjoyment  of  the  society 
of  kindred  souls,  together  with  his  abundant  wit  and 
humor,  made  him  a  universal  favorite.  I  could  record 
scenes  and  incidents  that  took  place  in  Aberdeen,  either 
in  his  own  lodgings  or  in  mine,  in  which  he  was  a  con- 
spicuous figure,  and  which  foreshadowed  in  no  unam- 
biguous way  the  man  as  he  was  soon  to  become.  In 
particular,  I  recollect  a  striking  reading  and  analysis  of 
part  of  one  of  Massinger's  plays,  in  his  own  room,  which 
clearly  disclosed  the  able  and  sympathetic  critic  that 
his  work  on  the  English  Poets,  later  on,  proved  him  to 
be.  But  these  are  sweet  memories  of  the  past,  which 
are  best  kept  to  one's  self. 


BIOGRAPHICAL   INTRODUCTION  XXX111 

For  a  number  of  years — indeed,  during  his  whole  stay- 
in  London,  Avhile  he  was  attached  to  literature  and 
journalism  there — Minto's  path  and  mine  lay  apart. 
Intercourse,  however,  was  heartily  resumed  when  he 
returned  to  Aberdeen  in  1880,  as  Professor  of  Logic  and 
English,  in  succession  to  Dr.  Bain,  and  continued  to  the 
end  of  his  life. 

I  can  now  speak  of  him  from  that  date  mainly  in  his 
professional  and  allied  capacities. 

The  first  thing  that  struck  one  in  Minto,  in  his  capacity 
of  professor,  was  his  deep  interest  in  his  students.  His 
first  concern  was  that,  both  in  the  English  and  in  the 
Logic  class,  each  man  should  derive  from  the  prelec- 
tions the  highest  possible  benefit  that  he  was  capable  of 
receiving.  As  a  consequence  he  spared  himself  no 
pains  in  the  preparation  of  his  class  lectures.  Again 
and  again  have  I  found  Minto,  in  his  own  house,  busy 
over  to-morrow's  lecture — trying  how  best  he  could 
express,  in  vigorous  phrase  and  with  the  apt  illustra- 
tion that  was  always  at  his  command,  the  point  that 
was  to  him  perfectly  clear,  but  which,  he  suspected, 
might  present  difficulty  to  the  student.  Lucidity  was, 
in  his  eyes,  the  supreme  virtue.  In  this  way  he  was 
ever  ready  to  discuss  with  you  obscure  points  in  phi- 
losophy or  in  rhetoric,  and  to  adopt  whatever  fresh  light 
you  might  be  able  to  throw  upon  the  situation.  He  was 
particularly  pleased  if  he  could  either  find  or  have  sug- 
gested to  him  some  fresh  historical  aspect  of  the  well- 
worn  academic  themes.  Every  year  that  passed  found 
him  deeper  in  his  conviction  of  the  power  of  the  his- 
torical method  in  elucidating  truth,  and  in  bringing 
home  its  meaning  to  the  learner.  And  this  applied  to 
his  teaching  of  English  as  much  as  to  his  teaching  of 
Psychology  and  Logic.  I  remember  one  day  finding 
him  in  high  spirits  over  the  discovery  he  had  just  made 
that  the  best  way  to  make  plain  to  his  class  the  mean- 
ing of  humor  was  by  inweaving  the  history  of  the 


XXXIV  BIOGRAPHICAL    INTRODUCTION 

word  into  his  technical  analysis,  and  accompanying  with 
copious  examples  from  literature.  "  Every  man  in  his 
humor,  you  know,"  cried  Minto,  jubilant  ;  "  it  was  his 
humor  to  wear  a  coat  with  lappets,"  and  so  on.  Allied 
to  this  was  his  keen  appreciation  of  luminous  definitions 
of  or  subtle  distinctions  between  synonymous  terms.  I 
cannot  forget  the  pleasure  with  which  he  received  a 
little  bit  of  phrasing  of  my  own  which  struck  him  as 
felicitous.  I  had  gone  to  Aberdeen  to  address  the  youth 
of  the  city  on  Dr.  Murray's  "  New  English  Dictionary," 
and,  while  there,  was  Minto's  guest.  "  What's  your 
subject?"  he  asked  on  my  arrival.  I  told  him  it  was 
Dr.  Murray's  Dictionary,  and  that  I  had  entitled  the 
lecture  "  Romance  in  Words."  " '  Romance  in  Words ' ! " 
he  exclaimed,  with  a  bright  gleam  of  the  eye,  which 
never  failed  when  his  intellectual  interest  was  awakened; 
"capital!  that  is  the  only  proper  definition  of  a  dic- 
tionary.'''' The  same  appreciation  of  word-distinctions 
marked  his  writings,  and  is  one  of  the  elements  that 
makes  his  style  so  admirable. 

A  chief  ground  of  Minto's  great  success  as  a  teacher, 
and  of  his  exceptional  popularity  with  the  students,  lay 
in  his  juvenility  of  spirit  and  his  boundless  sympathy 
with  youth.  He  was  supremely  fortunate  in  being  able 
to  put  himself  into  the  exact  position  of  his  audience, 
and  thereby  to  carry  them  along  with  him.  It  is  only 
another  way  of  putting  the  same  thing  to  say  that,  in 
teaching,  he  never  forgot  his  own  difficulties  in  student 
days  in  grappling  with  the  subjects  on  hand  ;  and  in 
setting  himself  with  all  his  might  to  remove  these  he 
was  adopting  the  best  plan  of  removing  the  difficulties 
of  his  hearers  also. 

Minto  himself  as  a  student,  in  his  professorial  days,  is 
a  theme  that  might  well  be  elaborated.  Vividly  the 
picture  rises  of  the  Professor  seated  in  his  study,  eagerly 
poring  over  some  volume,  or  busily  penning  some  dis- 
quisition, in  full  enjoyment  of  his  pipe  (for  the  harder  he 


BIOGRAPHICAL   INTRODUCTION  XXXV 

worked  the  harder  he  smoked)  ;  and  then  the  pause, 
the  sparkle  in  the  eye,  and  forthwith  some  subtile  criti- 
cism, or  some  apt  Chaucerian  quotation,  or  some  comic 
remark,  as  the  case  might  be  ;  after  that  relevant  talk 
or  discussion  ;  and  then  resumption  of  the  task.  But 
Minto  wrought  too  hard.  Regardless  of  health,  he  sat, 
when  not  on  college  duty,  almost  day  and  night  at  his 
desk  (for  he  burned  the  midnight  oil  far  too  profusely)  for 
a  number  of  years,  with  the  briefest  of  holidays — elabo- 
rating theories,  producing  brilliant  literary  essays,  dash- 
ing off  critical  reviews,  writing  novels,  and  shaping 
political  speeches.  Not  even  the  strongest  physical  con- 
stitution could  have  stood  it.  But  he  laughed  your 
warnings  and  advice  to  scorn,  and  waved  you  off  with 
such  a  comic  gesture  that  you  almost  forgave  him, 
though  you  quite  well  saw  that  he  was  putting  his 
resources  to  far  too  great  a  strain. 

As  an  examiner  Minto  was  the  embodiment  of  fair- 
ness. Scrupulous  to  a  degree  and  painstaking,  he  never 
would  allow  partialities  or  personal  predilections  to 
weigh  with  him.  This  I  can  unreservedly  testify,  from 
my  long  association  with  him  as  examiner  in  Philosophy 
and  English.  While  wishful  to  act  impartially,  he  was 
also  desirous  that  the  examinee  himself  should  feel  that 
strict  justice  was  being  done  to  him.  Hence  his  uni- 
form readiness  to  go  over  their  papers  with  students 
who  had  the  misfortune  to  "go  down"  at  an  examina- 
tion, and  to  show  them  frankly  where  and  why  they 
had  failed,  and  how  they  might  make  up  in  the  future. 
Many  an  unfortunate  had  reason  to  thank  him  for  this 
kindly  office. 

As  a  host  Minto  excelled.  To  see  him  at  his  best 
you  had  to  live  with  him  under  his  own  roof.  Not  only 
was  his  hospitality  abundant,  but  his  welcome  was  ever 
hearty  and  sincere.  The  stimulus,  too,  that  you 
derived  from  discussion  with  him,  and  the  enjoyment 
produced  by  his  racy  stories,  his  pleasantries  and  rep- 


XXXVI  BIOGRAPHICAL    INTRODUCTION 

artee,  his  sallies  of  genuine  wit,  were  experiences  never 
to  be  forgotten.  Whether  at  the  breakfast-table  or  at 
dinner,  alike  in  the  daytime  and  at  the  late  hours  of 
night,  in  his  study,  enveloped  in  a  cloud  of  tobacco- 
smoke,  Minto  was  always  the  same  kind,  bright,  genial 
entertainer,  rejoicing  in  you,  and  making  you  rejoice  in 
him. 

The  last  time  I  saw  Minto  was  in  my  own  house.  He 
came  to  pay  me  a  visit,  of  a  few  daj^s'  duration,  in  the 
middle  of  September,  1892.  As  there  were  two  other 
distinguished  thinkers  living  with  me  at  the  same  time, 
congenial  spirits,  he  was  in  his  best  form  intellectually, 
and  in  the  height  of  enjoyment,  though,  obviously,  in 
very  indifferent  health.  His  enfeebled  condition  was  to 
us  a  source  of  considerable  anxiety  ;  but  he  himself 
made  light  of  it — for  he  was  always  heroic.  Into  the 
amusements,  as  well  as  into  the  discussions,  that  went  on 
he  entered  heartily,  and  with  no  lack  of  his  wonted 
vivacity  ;  and  it  is  a  great  satisfaction  to  me  to  know 
that  he  pronounced  his  last  visit  here  to  be  one  of  the 
happiest  moments  of  his  life.  Four  months  more  and 
he  was  gone.  The  news  of  his  death  brought  to  friends 
everywhere  the  sense  of  an  irreparable  loss  ;  and  learn- 
ing mourned  the  departure  of  one  who  had  done  noble 
service  for  letters,  and  would  have  done  even  greater 
things  had  longer  life  been  given  him. 

The  following  notes  are  from  Mr.  P.  Chalmers 
Mitchell,  a  student  of  Professor  Minto' s,  and 
afterward  his  friend  : 

In  the  year  that  Professor  Minto  received  his  appoint- 
ments as  Professor  I  joined  the  University  of  Aberdeen 
as  a  first  year's  student.  I  saw  him  for  the  first  time  at 
his  inaugural  lecture  in  the  English  class,  'which  was 
then  held  later  in  the  day  than  the  other  classes  attended 
by  students  of  the  first  year.     It  is  no  disrespect  to  the 


BIOGRAPHICAL   INTRODUCTION  XXXV11 

memory  of  the  occupant  of  the  Latin  chair, — the  late 
Professor  Black, — or  to  the  present  distinguished  Princi- 
pal, who  was  then  Professor  of  Greek,  to  say  that  I  had 
left  both  their  classes,  unpersuaded,  either  by  the  bluff 
bonhomie  of  the  one  or  by  the  urbane  dignity  of  the 
other,  into  regarding  Latin  and  Greek  as  any  thing  but 
routine  tasks.  I  entered  the  English  class  singularly 
untouched  by  the  glamour  of  learning,  although  in  the 
pleasant  consciousness  that  a  university  was  vastly 
better  than  school,  because  its  day  was  several  hours 
shorter  ;  but  in  that  English  class-room  I  found  a  singu- 
larly pleasant  man,  not  lecturing  to  a  class,  but  sometimes 
sitting  back  in  his  chair,  sometimes  leaning  over  his  desk, 
and  talking  to  a  student,  perched  as  I  was  in  a  distant  and 
disaffected  back  row,  about  things  that  Avere  interesting. 
Beforehand  I  should  have  laughed  at  the  suggestion 
that  his  subject-matter  could  be  made  interesting.  He 
was  talking  about  parsing,  and  analysis,  and  the  deriva- 
tions of  words.  In  the  matter  of  parsing  it  was  obvious 
that  any  fool  could  do  it  ;  derivations  of  words  one  had 
hitherto  got  up  from  lists  before  prize  examinations  ; 
and  in  analysis  a  succession  of  masters  had  each  had 
a  separate  whim  in  nomenclature.  But  in  Professor 
Minto's  hands  the  derivation  of  words  was  so  treated 
that  a  Dictionary  became  a  pageant  of  History,  showing 
here  the  Crusaders  dusty  from  the  Holy  Land,  bringing 
with  them  some  new  idea,  some  strange  animal  or  plant ; 
or  there  the  prancing  Normans  introducing  the  graces 
of  chivalry  or  the  subtleties  of  law.  The  parsing  of 
words  was  a  tradition  from  the  grammatical  complexity 
of  more  primitive  conditions  of  the  language.  The 
terminology  of  analysis  was  as  you  pleased  ;  the  analysis 
itself  was  an  anatomical  display  of  the  vital  organs,  by 
which  a  sentence  should  convey  its  meaning.  I  can  see 
now  that  in  this  first  lecture  Professor  Minto  showed 
the  leading  feature  of  his  teaching.  The  information 
he  gave  he  did  not  offer  for  the  direct  acquisition  of  his 


XXXV1U  BIOGRAPHICAL    INTRODUCTION 

pupils,  as  of  intrinsic  value.  What  was  given  was  put 
before  us  as  an  illustration  of  the  vast  interest  of  the 
field  of  knowledge,  waiting  for  any  of  us  who  cared  to 
enter  it.  Incidentally  we  learned  much,  but  chiefly  we 
learned  how  and  why  we  were,  for  ourselves,  to  learn 
more.  In  knowledge  generally  there  were  two  special 
interests  :  the  picturesque  and  human  interest  of  how  our 
language,  and  our  Logic,  came  to  be  as  they  are  ;  and 
the  practical  interest — clearly  separate  from  the  other — 
of  how  best  to  use  our  language,  or  our  reasoning,  for 
the  purposes  of  to-day. 

The  bent  of  Professor  Minto's  teaching  was  specially 
marked  in  his  lectures  upon  Logic.  I  do  not  think  that 
the  technical  subtleties  of  Formal  Logic  had  much 
attraction  for  him.  Certainly  he  did  not  seek  to  stamp 
on  the  minds  of  his  class  the  fantastic  ingenuities  of 
ancient  and  modern  school-men.  His  lectures  upon 
Formal  Logic  were  lectures  upon  its  evolution,  and  he 
sought  to  show  us  how  each  stage  in  the  development 
of  Deductive  Logic  was  the  abstract  expression  of  an 
actual  advance  in  man's  power  of  reasoning ;  and  so  we 
were  spared  the  paradox  which  presents  itself  to  the 
modern  beginner  in  Deductive  Logic.  Although  many 
processes  of  the  "  science  of  thought "  seem  but  cum- 
brous methods  of  expressing  the  obvious,  each  method 
as  unfolded  by  him  had  its  explanation  in  the  forgotten 
past.  On  the  other  hand,  it  was  the  practical  use  of 
Inductive  Logic  that  Professor  Minto  chiefly  insisted 
upon.  In  his  exposition  of  this  he  followed  with  rare 
appreciative  sympathy,  considering  the  varied  interests 
of  his  life,  the  progress  of  the  natural  and  physical 
sciences.  As  these  notes  must,  from  their  brevity,  be 
discursive,  let  me  say  that  afterward,  when  I  knew  him 
better,  I  was  struck  with  his  continued  interest  in  sub- 
jects so  remote  from  his  own  work  as  advances  in  Com- 
parative Anatomy  and  Embryology.  While  on  a  visit 
to  me  at  Oxford,  in  the  summer  before  he  died,  two  of 


BIOGRAPHICAL   INTRODUCTION  XXXIX 

the  things  that  interested  him  most  were  some  new 
preparations  of  fossil  skulls  in  the  University  Museum, 
and  a  technical  discussion  on  Weismann's  views  on 
heredity. 

English  Literature  had  so  small  a  place  in  the  cur- 
riculum for  the  degree  of  M.  A.  that  Professor  Minto 
could  only  give  us  twenty-five  lectures  on  it.  But  in 
that  brief  space  he  so  introduced  us  to  the  writers  of 
our  own  tongue  that  their  books  became  friends  to  us 
for  life.  In  my  own  case,  and  in  that  of  many  others, 
I  know  that  the  most  permanent  impression  we  got  at 
the  University  of  Aberdeen  was  the  love  of  English 
books,  not  for  purposes  of  future  analytic  study,  but 
simply  as  our  friends  throughout  life.  Recently,  when 
we  were  talking  about  the  proposed  institution  of  a  final 
honors  school  of  English  Literature  at  Oxford,  I  told 
him  of  what  I  had  got  from  his  own  short  course  in 
Aberdeen.  He  said  in  reply — what  is  specially  worth 
remembering,  now  that  so  many  schools  of  English 
Literature  are  practically  accomplished  facts  :  "  I  agree 
with  those  who  think  that  English  Literature  might  be 
made  quite  as  severe  an  intellectual  discipline  as  Greek 
or  as  Russian  ;  but  the  point  most  easily  lost  sight  of, 
when  it  is  turned  into  a  discipline,  is  that  it  is  the  readiest 
friend  and  the  greatest  comfort  to  the  many  who  get 
their  discipline  in  other  subjects.  You  can  get  intellec- 
tual discipline  from  any  thing,  but  most  people  don't  get 
much  pleasure  out  of  the  things  that  were  used  to  train 
their  minds." 

Not  only  was  Professor  Minto  constantly  accessible, 
and  most  ready  to  help  and  advise  his  students  in  every 
way,  but  he  kept  up  friendly  relations  with  many  of 
them,  and  he  was  interested  in  them  all,  in  their  subse- 
quent careers.  The  warm  admiration  I  had  for  him 
while  I  was  a  student  continued  after  I  left  the  Uni- 
versity ;  and  I  had  the  great  good  fortune  to  see  him 
subsequently,  on  terms  more  intimate  than  are  possible 


Xl  BIOGRAPHICAL   INTRODUCTION 

between  teacher  and  pupil.  It  is  perhaps  only  given  to 
poets  adequately  to  memorialize  their  dead  friends. 
Nature  makes  other  mortals  more  reticent,  though  reti- 
cence may  be  selfish  ;  but  I  wish  to  say  two  things  about 
Professor  Minto.  I  wish  to  record  the  intense  friendli- 
ness of  his  character.  I  do  not  only  mean  that  he  was 
the  readiest  of  men  to  do  good  turns  to  others.  All 
who  knew  him  know  that.  But  he  had  the  rare  virtue 
of  seeing  and  believing  only  the  best  of  other  people. 
"  What  continually  impresses  me,"  he  would  say,  "  are 
what  good  fellows  people  are  !  "  I  have  known  no 
instance  like  him  of  the  "charity  that  thinketh  no  evil." 
It  was  really  difficult  for  him  to  believe  that  any  of  his 
acquaintances  would  do  a  mean  thing,  or  an  ill-natured 
thing,  purposely.  Of  one  or  two  people  who  had 
obviously  done  him  an  ill  turn  I  have  heard  him  say  : 
"  Yes,  I  suppose  he  doesn't  like  me,  but,  you  know,  he  is 
really  a  good  fellow  at  heart  ; "  and  then  he  would  give 
some  practical  instance  of  conduct  to  his  credit. 

The  last  thing  I  wish  to  set  down  is  this  :  In  no  case, 
while  I  was  a  student,  did  I  ever  hear  Professor  Minto, 
in  class  or  in  private,  touch  upon  any  theological  topic. 
Afterward,  even  in  intimate  talk,  he  rarely  spoke  of 
ultimate  questions  of  metaphysic  or  belief.  He  had  not 
the  Scottish  habit  of  strengthening  his  convictions  by 
measuring  them  against  those  of  others.  But  in  my 
rooms  at  Oxford,  the  last  evening  he  was  with  me,  and 
the  last  time  I  saw  him,  he  took  a  book  from  my  shelves 
and  said:  "One  person  I  have  to  make  good — viz.,  my- 
self ;  but  my  duty  to  my  neighbor  is  much  more  nearly 
expressed  by  saying  that  I  have  to  make  him  happy,  if 
I  may." 

Mr.  John  H.  Lobban,  who  acted  as  Professor 
Minto' s  assistant  in  his  latest  years  at  the  Univer- 
sity, has  sent  me  an  appreciative  estimate,  which 
many  Aberdeen  students  will  be  glad  to  read : 


BIOGRAPHICAL    INTRODUCTION  xli 

In  Mill's  rectorial  address  to  the  students  of  St. 
Andrews  there  is  a  passage  which  might,  with  great  fit- 
ness, be  applied  to  Professor  Minto's  work  at  the  Uni- 
versity of  Aberdeen.  "  There  is  nothing,"  said  Mill, 
"  which  spreads  more  contagiously  from  teacher  to  pupil 
than  elevation  of  sentiment  :  often  and  often  have 
students  caught  from  the  influence  of  a  professor  a  con- 
tempt for  mean  and  selfish  objects,  and  a  noble  ambition 
to  leave  the  world  better  than  they  found  it,  which  they 
have  carried  with  them  throughout  life."  The  tributes 
already  paid  by  students  are  abundant  evidence  that 
Professor  Minto  exercised  such  an  influence  ;  but  few 
students  could  have  been  fully  aware  of  the  thorough- 
ness and  scrupulous  fairness  with  which  he  performed 
his  duties  as  professor  and  examiner. 

These  qualities  his  assistants  had  necessarily  excellent 
opportunities  of  observing,  and  I  recollect  how  forcibly  I 
was  impressed  by  them  when  I  had  first  to  examine 
university  papers  under  his  supervision.  In  the  case  of 
one  examination,  where  the  time  for  correction  was  so 
limited  that  he  divided  the  papers  with  me,  Professor 
Minto  had  arranged  a  scheme  of  marking  with  such 
precision  that,  after  doing  a  number  of  papers  together, 
the  possibility  of  a  discrepancy  between  our  respective 
estimates  was  reduced  to  a  minimum.  It  was  only  after 
having  tested  some  of  my  results  that  he  felt  justified, 
in  fairness  to  the  students,  in  leaving  a  number  of  papers 
entirely  in  my  hands.  One  other  instance  of  the  same 
desire  for  scrupulous  fairness  I  may  record.  One  of  a 
number  of  essays  that  I  had  to  value  was  so  atrociously 
written  and  marred  by  emendations  that,  actuated,  no 
doubt,  by  a  not  unnatural  impatience,  I  had  marked  it 
rather  hardly.  Although  one  of  more  than  a  hundred 
essays,  it  did  not  pass  the  professor's  eye  ;  for  when 
soon  after  I  went  to  discuss  them  with  him,  he  asked 
me  with  characteristic  humor  and  courtesy  if  I  would 
allow  him  to  read  an  essay  to  me.     As  read  by  him  it 


xlii  BIOGRAPHICAL   INTRODUCTION 

certainly  was  more  than  an  average  production,  and  as 
I  saw  the  lesson  he  meant  so  courteously  to  convey,  I 
owned  my  error  and  suggested  a  higher  value,  which 
he  agreed  to.  He  then  laughingly  told  me  that  he  had 
generally  to  impress  his  assistants  with  the  moral  that 
the  matter  of  a  student's  paper  should  not  be  taxed  for 
any  blemish  in  its  outward  form. 

As  a  lecturer  Professor  Minto  had  a  horror  of  "  talk- 
ing at  large."  When  using  his  lecture  notes,  I  was 
struck  with  the  endless  erasures  and  corrections  in  the 
manuscript.  This  was  due  to  his  passionate  desire  for 
clear  thinking  and  clear  expression.  He  once  told  me 
that,  whenever  he  noticed  any  general  inability  on  the 
part  of  his  class  to  follow  him,  he  at  once  reconsidered 
the  passage,  and  strove  with  all  his  powers  of  language 
to  put  it  in  a  way  that  would  admit  of  no  dispute. 
This  was  the  explanation  of  the  countless  erasures,  the 
explanation,  too,  I  imagine,  of  the  unique  way  in  which 
he  could  compel  the  unbroken  interest  of  his  students, 
no  matter  what  the  subject  on  hand.  He  desired,  he 
told  me,  that  his  students  should  always  get  hold  of 
something  definite  in  every  lecture,  but  few  who  reaped 
the  advantage  of  that  simplicity  and  clearness  had  any 
idea  of  the  infinite  pains  and  literary  skill  that  produced 
them. 

Of  the  thoroughness  that  permeated  all  his  work  I 
may  adduce  one  example  that  fell  under  my  notice. 
About  a  month  before  the  Christmas  vacation  he  had 
to  deliver  a  historical  lecture  to  a  country  audience. 
As  he  was  loaded  with  other  work,  and  even  at  that 
time  far  from  strong,  I  suggested  that  he  might  save 
himself  so  much  research  by  using  some  of  his  plentiful 
old  material,  which,  I  argued,  would  have  been  quite  as 
acceptable  to  his  audience.  He  humorously  rebuked  me 
for  my  base  advice,  saying  that  he  had  "  still  some 
regard  for  his  literary  conscience,"  and  that  he  had 
become  so  interested  in  his  subject  that  he  had  ceased 


BIOGRAPHICAL    INTRODUCTION  xlili 

to  view  it  as  a  task.  This  I  found  to  be  no  idle 
assertion,  for  in  a  conversation  some  days  later,  when 
talking  over  the  subject  of  his  lecture,  he  cited 
dates  and  quoted  extensive  passages  from  history 
with  such  absolute  ease  that  I  am  convinced  that, 
though  as  yet  he  had  not  put  a  word  on  paper,  I 
got  the  bulk  of  the  lecture,  delivered  with  as  much 
accuracy  and  grace  of  expression  as  did  the  audience 
that  heard  it  read. 

It  is,  however,  of  the  period  of  his  last  illness  that  I 
can  hope  to  add  any  thing  of  interest  to  what  has  been 
already  said  by  others.  It  seemed  to  me  characteristic 
of  Professor  Minto  that,  when  he  was  suddenly  prostrated 
and  unable  to  conduct  his  two  classes,  he  did  not  bid  me, 
or  even  ask  me,  to  fill  the  breach.  When  summoned  by 
him  to  consider  what  was  to  be  done  in  the  emergency, 
he  suggested  his  proposal  with  the  utmost  delicacy  ; 
and  it  was  only  after  I  had  expressed  my  willingness  to 
try  the  work  that  he  accepted  as  a  favor  what  he  would 
obviously  have  been  justified  in  regarding  as  a  privilege 
conferred.  During  the  whole  of  his  illness  it  is  no 
hyperbole  to  say  that  he  exhibited  an  extraordinary 
triumph  of  will.  It  was  his  express  wish  that  he  should 
know  exactly  what  I  lectured  on  from  day  to  day,  and, 
though  racked  with  pain,  he  discussed  the  work  of  both 
classes  with  all  his  usual  ardor.  It  was  sometimes  hard 
for  me  to  realize  the  extent  of  his  illness  while  he  im- 
pressed upon  me  the  important  points  of  some  devel- 
opment in  literature  which  he  desired  me  to  emphasize. 
His  rare  powers  of  memory  never  failed  him,  and  I 
recollect  how,  while  propped  up  in  bed,  he  would  quote 
illustrations  for  the  English  lectures  from  Chaucer  or 
Pope,  unravel  one  of  Marlowe's  or  Shakespeare's  plots, 
or  explain  some  far-fetched  conceit  in  Donne.  It  seemed 
to  me  infinitely  pathetic  to  hear  him  in  broken  words, 
but  feigning  something  of  that  joyous  ring  of  voice 
with  which    his    students  will    always   associate  their 


xllV  BIOGRAPHICAL   INTRODUCTION 

memories  of  Chaucer,  assuring  me  that  John  Donne 
deserved  the  epitaph  : 

"  Here  lies  a  king  that  ruled,  as  he  thought  fit, 
The  universal  monarchy  of  wit." 

It  was,  however,  on  the  occasion  of  his  attempt  to 
resume  work  for  the  second  time  that  his  mental  hero- 
ism was  most  apparent.  He  told  me  repeatedly  that 
he  felt  it  to  be  his  only  chance  of  recovery,  and  that 
if  he  could  not  lecture  he  might  surrender  all  hope. 
Doubtless  this  feeling  was  genuine,  but  I  saw  that  he 
was  prompted  also  by  the  desire  to  relieve  myself  of  at 
least  half  the  work.  I  was  present  in  his  anteroom 
when  he  literally  staggered  into  the  class-room  to 
deliver  his  last  lecture  ;  and  I  can  conceive  no  greater 
effort  of  will  than  that  which  enabled  him  to  triumph 
over  his  pain,  and  to  deliver  a  brilliant  lecture  on  the 
decline  of  the  Elizabethan  drama. 

Of  the  value  of  his  own  literary  work  he  was  ever 
dubious.  On  more  than  one  occasion  during  his  illness 
he  spoke  hesitatingly  of  what  he  had  written  as  not 
"half  good  enough  for  publication,"  and  the  only  time 
I  remember  him  speaking  with  confidence  of  his  unpub- 
lished work  was,  curiously  enough,  the  last  occasion  on 
which  he  spoke  to  me  of  literary  matters.  Asking  me 
whether  I  saw  my  way  clear  to  the  end  of  the  session,  he 
begged  me  to  do  all  the  justice  I  could  to  the  lecture  on 
Burns,  repeating,  with  unusual  emphasis,  that  his  lecture 
on  Burns, formerly  delivered  at  Edinburgh,  was  "most 
distinctly  the  best  thing  "  that  he  had  ever  written. 

It  would  be  an  injustice  to  Professor  Minto's  memory, 
and  one  specially  unpardonable  for  me  to  commit,  were 
I  not  to  record  the  appreciation  he  had  of  the  sympathy 
extended  him  by  the  students.  It  will  always  be  a 
pleasure  for  the  English  and  Logic  students  of  1892-93 
to  know  that  Professor    Minto   repeatedly   said   that 


BIOGRAPHICAL   INTRODUCTION  xlv 

nothing  had  ever  touched  him  more  deeply  than  the 
way  in  which  the  students  had  reciprocated  the  feelings 
he  had  always  entertained  for  them. 

During  the  past  eighteen  years  it  has  fallen  to 
my  lot  to  suggest  many  distinguished  men  for 
the  St.  Andrews  honorary  degree  of  Doctor  of 
Laws  ;  but  there  is  no  one  whom  I  ever  proposed 
with  greater  satisfaction  than  Professor  Minto. 

The  spontaneous  tributes  borne  to  him  after 
his  death  in  the  Aberdeen  University  Magazine, 
— Alma  Mater, — alike  by  students  and  professors, 
were  more  significant  of  the  work  he  did,  and  of 
the  esteem  in  which  he  was  held,  than  the 
tributes  recorded  of  any  other  Scottish  teacher 
at  the  close  of  this  century.  From  Alma  Mater 
of  March  1,  1893,  the  following  extracts  may  be 
made : 

The  first  notice  in  "In  Memoriam "  is  entitled 
"  Vale  !  "     In  it  the  following  occurs  : 

The  highest  tribute  we  can  pay  to  Professor  Minto's 
memory  is  to  say  that  he  was  the  students'  friend. 
With  that  disinterestedness  and  that  perseverance 
which  we  must  ever  identify  with  his  life,  he  has  often 
pleaded  our  cause  when  we  least  knew  it,  and  in  his 
contact  with  the  members  of  his  own  classes  his  genial 
manner,  his  winning  expression  of  face,  and  above  all 
his  kindly  word,  stand  out  even  more  strongly  than  his 
more  immediate  teaching.  If  there  was  ever  a  man 
who  touched  the  heart  of  studentdom,  that  man  was 
William  Minto.  His  life  was  a  living  emblem  of  the 
power  of  sympathy.  He  felt  for  us  and  with  us,  and, 
naturally  enough,  we  came  first  to  respect  and  then  to 
love  him.     In  the  words  of  Alfred  Tennyson,  he  was 


xlvi  BIOGRAPHICAL    INTRODUCTION 

"most  a  man,"  and,  while  we  reverenced  his  intellect 
and  gloried  in  his  fame,  it  was  for  his  manliness,  his 
human  nature,  that  we  loved  him.  "  His  students 
almost  adored  him,"  said  a  press  writer,  in  commenting 
on  his  death,  and  there  is  no  exaggeration  in  the  state- 
ment. To  the  outside  world  he  was  known  for  the  fame 
of  his  mental  powers,  to  us  rather  for  his  unfailing 
courtesy  of  manner,  his  rare  loveliness  of  spirit.  It  was 
no  mere  precept  that  he  gave  when  he  told  us  to  do 
our  best  to  leave  one  small  corner  of  earth  the  better 
for  our  being  in  it,  for  was  not  this  his  own  constant 
endeavor?  Of  his  devotion  to  duty  one  can  scarcely 
speak,  for  had  it  been  less,  we  cannot  but  feel  that  he 
might  have  been  with  us  to-day.  When  public  spirit, 
kindliness  of  disposition,  and  intellectual  force  unite  to 
make  a  man  and  a  teacher  who  is  brought  into  contact 
with  those  whose  characters  have  in  great  measure  to 
be  formed,  need  we  wonder  that  his  removal  should 
leave  a  gap  which  it  seems  well-nigh  impossible  to  fill, 
and  make  the  unspoken  thought  of  every  student  in 
Aberdeen  University  to-day:  "Without  you,  William 
Minto,  our  world  seems  lonesome  "  ? 

Mr.  H.  J.  C.  Grierson,  Professor  Minto' s  suc- 
cessor in  the  Chair  of  English  Literature,  wrote  : 

"  Parmenides,  my  Master  Parmenides  !  " 

Professor  Minto  has  passed  away,  and  with  him  a 
gifted  and  inspiring  teacher.  Some  who  have  spoken 
of  him  have  done  so  from  the  position  of  those  who 
knew  his  great  predecessor,  and  could  compare  the  two. 
We  knew  only  the  one,  and  found  in  him  the  one  true 
teacher  of  our  experience. 

Perhaps  it  is  for  this  reason  that  we  cannot  draw  the 
usual  distinction  between  his  teaching  of  literature  and 
of  philosophy.     It  may  be  that  in  the  former  he  had 


BIOGRAPHICAL    INTRODUCTION  xlvii 

done  more  original  and  valuable  work,  but  it  was  in  bis 
Logic  class  tbat,  for  my  own  part,  I  first  felt  bis  full 
power  as  an  instructor,  and  caugbt  tbe  spirit  of  bis 
metbod.  Dr.  W.  L.  Mackenzie  bas  said  justly  tbat  tbat 
method  was  historic,  but  it  was  also  dialectic  in  tbe 
Socratic  sense  of  the  word.  He  realized  to  no  small 
extent  that  the  truest  function  of  the  teacher  was  not 
to  fill  the  mind  with  information  from  without,  but  to 
elicit  its  own  latent  thoughts  and  faculties  and  inter- 
ests. I  have  had  occasion  to  compare  bis  method  with 
that  of  other  lecturers  in  Logic,  and  it  has  deepened  my 
sense  of  its  value.  He  began  with  no  abstract  defini- 
tions, and  he  uttered  no  dogmatic  statements,  but  he 
led  us  easily,  and  acquiescing  with  him  at  each  step, 
from  the  simplest  facts  of  our  every-day  consciousness  to 
a  realization  of  the  great  problems  of  truth  and  reality. 

In  fact,  the  spirit  of  Professor  Minto's  philosophic 
teaching  and  literary  criticism  recalls  the  spirit  of  the 
greatest  of  teachers  and  critics,  the  Socrates  that  we 
know  in  Plato.  It  pursued  the  same  enquiring  method, 
it  subjected  to  the  same  searching  criticism  all  tradi- 
tional dogmas,  it  glowed  with  the  same  enthusiasm  for 
truth,  and  the  best  expression  of  truth. 

Nor  in  other  respects  was  he  unlike  that  great  teacher. 
Like  him  he  loved  young  men,  and  met  them  with 
openness  and  freedom,  from  all  assertions  of  superiority. 
When  but  Bajans  we  were  "  gentlemen  "  to  him,  with 
opinions  of  our  own,  and  minds  to  be  appealed  to  ;  and 
when  we  came  to  know  him  personally,  we  found  the 
same  openness,  and  a  close  personal  interest  in  our  lives 
and  futures.  He  discussed  with  us  ;  he  planned  with 
us  ;  he  laughed  with  us — and  we  loved  him  ;  but  now, 
like  Socrates,  he  is  taken  from  us  when  our  esteem  and 
affection  were  still  growing,  and  we  know  not  when 
we  shall  behold  him  again.  "  The  hour  of  departure  is 
come  :  we  go  our  ways — I  to  die,  you  to  live  ;  but 
whose  lot  is  happier  is  hidden  from  all  save  God." 


xlviii  BIOGRAPHICAL    INTRODUCTION 

The  following  recollections  are  by  his  colleague 
Professor  W.  M.  Ramsay  : 

It  is  not  an  easy  task  that  the  editors  of  Alma  Mater 
have  proposed  to  me  ;  but  I  will  try,  at  their  request, 
to  perform  it,  however  inadequately  and  imperfectly. 
To  describe  on  the  moment  a  character  so  marked,  so 
powerful,  so  self-contained  and  complete,  so  indepen- 
dent and  individual,  so  true  to  his  friends,  so  difficult  for 
his  enemies,  is  beyond  my  poor  powers.  I  can  only  try 
to  relate  what  I  actually  saw  of  William  Minto,  and  the 
impression  he  made  on  me  in  old  times,  and  this  may 
perhaps  help  to  give  some  shadow  of  his  personality.  At 
this  moment  I  should  like,  as  far  as  possible,  to  avoid 
any  thing  that  should  rouse  any  feeling  except  sym- 
pathy. 

When  I  entered  College, Minto  was  Assistant  Professor 
of  Natural  Philosophy,  and  it  is  a  curious  proof  of  the 
ignorance  of  University  business  and  University  life  that 
used  to  characterize  some  Bajans  that  I  never,  during 
that  winter,  heard  a  word  about  the  great  controversy 
in  which  he  was  involved.  It  was  not  till  years  had 
passed  that  I  came  to  know  what  had  occurred.  After 
more  than  twenty  years  had  passed  I  found  out  the 
facts  by  consulting  the  files  of  the  Aberdeen  papers  ; 
and  then  I  learned  for  the  first  time  how  splendidly  the 
late  Principal  Pirie  had  advocated  his  cause  in  the  Court. 
My  ignorance  at  the  time  will  therefore  serve  as  an 
excuse  for  passing  over  the  subject ;  but  no  one  could 
refrain  from  alluding  to  the  moral  triumph  which  he 
gained  in  the  long-run  over  those  who  had  defeated 
him — so  far  as  worldly  appearance  went — at  the  time. 
Few  men  in  my  time  have  had  such  a  hard  trial  as  he 
had  when,  at  the  conclusion  of  a  most  brilliant  Univer- 
sity career,  crowned  with  a  Ferguson  Scholarship,  his 
alma  mater  closed  her  gates  against  him  for  an  action 
which  at  the  present  time    would  be   applauded  and 


BIOGRAPHICAL    INTRODUCTION  xlix 

approved  by  all.  We  should  now  look  on  it  as  a  proof 
of  innate  delicacy  and  gentlemanly  spirit,  if  there  could 
possibly  arise  an  occasion  to  provoke  it — which,  with 
the  tone  that  now  rules  in  university  life,  is,  I  believe, 
impossible.  In  truth,  there  has  been  a  great  improve- 
ment in  the  standard  of  public  feeling  within  the  last 
twenty -five  years,  and  I  hope  we  should  now  make  better 
use  of  his  genius  than  of  old. 

It  was  not  till  the  end  of  my  fourth  year  at  College 
that  I  first  knew  Minto,  and  our  acquaintance  began  in 
connection  with  the  recently  founded  Literary  Society,  to 
which,  after  a  time,  I  had  the  honor  of  proposing  that 
he  should  be  admitted  as  an  honorary  member.  His 
name  was  already  familiar  to  me,  for  in  the  course  of 
my  third  year  he  had  matriculated  as  a  student,  and  had 
taken  an  active  part  in  the  re-election  of  Sir  M.  E.  Grant 
Duff  as  Lord  Rector.  I  was  sometimes  quoted  as  a  sad 
example  of  the  students  whom  he  had  perverted  to  vote 
against  the  cause  of  Classics  ;  but,  in  reality,  I  never  to 
my  knowledge  saw  him  during  that  year,  much  less 
listened  to  his  alluring  speeches  in  public  or  in  private. 
"Bitter  constraint  and  sad  occasion  dear"  impelled  me 
even  then,  when  I  had  only  vague  blind  yearnings  after 
ancient  literature,  to  vote  as  I  have  always  done  against 
the  misdirection  of  classical  studies,  debasing  them  to 
be  fetters,  instead  of  wings,  for  the  free  modern  spirit. 
It  was  our  common  study  of  modern  literature  that  first 
brought  us  together  as  lovers  of  the  "romantic  "  side  in 
that  literature,  as  believers  that  the  aim  and  crown  of 
all  literary  education  is  to  understand  and  appreciate  the 
spirit  of  our  own  age.  We  approached  literature  from 
quite  opposite  sides,  and  we  differed  widely  on  many 
points  of  thought  and  life, — not  points  of  mere  detail, 
but  ideas  which  we  believed  with  our  whole  heart  to  be 
of  infinite  importance,  and  on  behalf  of  which  he  at 
least  was  ready  to  die, — yet  our  differences  of  view  never 
interfered  with  our  friendship  ;  and  when  we  met,  after 


1  BIOGRAPHICAL   INTRODUCTION 

years  of  separation,  the  old  feelings  remained  as  strong 
as  ever. 

Very  soon  after  he  joined  the  Literary  Society,  we 
elected  him  to  the  office  of  President,  which  fell  vacant 
opportunely  ;  and  there  can  be  no  doubt  that  the  success 
of  the  young  society  was  greatly  due  to  the  skill  and 
knowledge  which  he  brought  to  our  aid. 

After  seeing  a  great  deal  of  him  in  1871  I  lost  sight 
of  him  for  years,  till  we  met  accidentally  on  a  London 
steam-boat  pier  in  1879  ;  and  we  continued  to  meet  dur- 
ing my  occasional  visits  to  London,  until  I  disappeared 
into  the  wilds  of  Asiatic  Turkey  in  the  spring  of  1880. 
Before  I  went  out  he  offered  to  do  his  best  to  procure 
the  acceptance  of  letters  from  Turkey  by  the  great 
London  morning  paper  with  which  he  was  at  the  time 
connected.  I  fully  intended  to  avail  myself  of  his 
advocacy,  but  time  was  too  short  and  life  too  busy  for 
letter-writing,  and  only  one  or  two  brief  notes  passed 
between  us,  until  the  spring  of  1886,  when  I  received  a 
letter  from  him  telling  that  the  Humanity  Chair  here 
would  shortly  be  vacant,  and  advising  me  to  be  a  candi- 
date. I  am  glad  now  to  say  publicly,  as  I  have  often 
said  to  him,  that  I  owe  my  appointment  to  this  letter, 
and  to  the  timely  information  which  it  gave  me.  But 
for  his  letter  I  should  have  been  ignorant,  till  it  was  too 
late,  about  the  impending  vacancy,  and  about  various 
other  facts  which  it  was  essential  to  know. 

In  the  abundant  opportunities  I  have  since  then  had 
of  observing  Minto  the  quality  that  most  struck  me  was 
his  thoroughness.  Every  thing  I  have  ever  seen  him  do 
was  done  with  the  same  devotion  :  he  brought  his  whole 
powers  of  mind,  and  often  (as  I  saw  with  alarm)  his 
whole  powers  of  body,  to  the  work.  The  minute  esti- 
mate of  the  capacities  and  faults  of  all  his  students  which 
I  have  seen  noted  down  in  his  books — apparently  as  a 
regular  practice — astonished  me  ;  they  resembled  the 
sketches  which  professional  readers    of    character  are 


BIOGRAPHICAL   INTRODUCTION  li 

ready  to  supply  to  customers.  He  did  not  merely  esti- 
mate numerically  the  value  of  each  examination  paper, 
lie  also  estimated  it  qualitatively  as  an  index  of  the 
candidate's  moral  and  intellectual  character. 

That  he  persistently  overworked  himself  I  often 
observed,  and  often  remonstrated  with  him  about  it — 
always  to  be  met  with  the  laughing  reply  that  I  Avas 
myself  a  worse  instance  of  the  fault.  The  chill  which 
brought  on  the  last  illness  was,  I  think,  attributed  by 
him  to  a  game  at  curling  during  the  Christmas  vaca- 
tion ;  but  it  seemed  to  me  that  quite  as  great  mischief 
was  done  in  December  at  a  meeting  of  Faculty  in  the 
icy  Senatus-room,  where  he  sat  for  more  than  two  hours 
at  the  head  of  the  table,  till  he  was  obviously  chilled  to 
the  marrow.  When  the  meeting  was  over,  he  came  to 
the  fire,  saying  :  "  I  might  as  well  go  to  my  grave  as 
do  this  sort  of  thing  again."  I  have  often  pitied  the 
wretched  candidates  for  Honors  and  Scholarships,  who 
are  compelled  to  shiver  for  three  hours  at  a  time  in  that 
room,  which  is  generally  as  cold  as  a  Roman  Church  on 
the  Aventine  in  winter.  By  the  time  a  few  more  have 
suffered  from  it  a  new  Senatus-room  may  be  ready  in 
Marischal  College. 

There  is  one  quality  which  beyond  all  others  rouses 
my  admiration,  and  that  quality  Minto  had  in  a  remark- 
able degree — I  mean  courage.  I  can  worship  even  mere 
physical  courage,  which  it  is  nowadays  the  fashion  to 
despise  (especially  among  those  who  have  never  needed 
or  seen  or  felt  it)  ;  but  the  splendid  moral  courage  which 
he  showed  seems  to  me  almost  the  greatest  quality  in 
human  nature.  He  never  flinched  a  hair's-breadth  from 
the  opinion  he  believed  in,  however  unpopular,  or  even 
dangerous,  it  might  be  :  he  always  supported  a  friend  if 
the  world  was  against  him. 

As  a  critic  and  scholar  he  was  only  coming  to  full 
consciousness  of  his  powers  and  freedom  in  using  them  ; 
and  there  is  good  reason  to  think  that  the  future  work 


Hi  BIOGRAPHICAL    INTRODUCTION 

which  (had  fate  been  kinder  to  us)  he  would  have  done 
as  the  first  Professor  of  English  in  this  University 
would  have  been  his  best  work,  and,  I  think,  would  have 
taken  permanent  rank  among  the  finest  in  its  kind.  His 
genius  matured  slowly,  partly  from  its  natural  chai-acter, 
partly  from  the  distractions  and  variations  of  occupa- 
tion in  which  his  life  had  been  spent.  Truly,  I  think 
the  University  might  have  gained  by  wise  treatment 
much  more  from  him  than  it  did. 

The  Faculty  of  Arts  has  lost  him  who  was  not  merely 
the  titular  head,  but  also  by  a  combination  of  fine  quali- 
ties the  mainstay  of  its  reputation,  both  in  Aberdeen 
and  before  the  world.  The  University  has  lost  its 
clearest  headed  and  ablest  administrator  :  in  every  ques- 
tion that  emerged  he  recognized  at  a  glance  what  was 
the  solution,  and  urged  it  with  unhesitating  energy. 
His  quick  insight  was  due  to  the  fact  that  he  never  was 
governed  by  a  calculation  of  selfish  or  narrow  advan- 
tages :  in  every  case  he  judged  upon  the  same  general 
principles.  He  lived  and  fought  for  an  ideal  of  freedom 
and  honesty,  in  the  ultimate  triumph  of  which  he  had 
the  most  unfaltering  confidence.  In  this  lay  his  strength, 
and  the  secret  of  his  perfect  frankness  and  freedom 
from  affectation.  He  worked,  not  for  himself,  not  even 
for  his  family,  but  for  his  cause.  He  had  nothing  to 
conceal,  but  rather  gloried  in  openly  stating  his  real 
aims  ;  and  many  believe,  as  I  do,  that,  had  not  his 
policy  been  so  often  thwarted,  our  University  would 
be  to-day  far  stronger  than  it  is. 

In  The  Bookman  of  April,  1893,  Mr.  A.  T. 
Quiller-Couch  wrote : 

Were  I  to  confess  how  seldom  we  met  and  how  slight 
was  our  correspondence,  your  readers  would  think  it 
highly  presumptuous  of  me  to  write  about  Professor 
Minto,  and  that  to  call  him  a  friend  was  almost  inde- 


BIOGRAPHICAL   INTRODUCTION  HH 

cent.  Yet  on  one  point,  at  any  rate,  they  would  be 
wrong.  It  is  a  fact  that  we  never  wrote  a  line  to  each 
other  ;  yet  from  time  to  time,  and  by  every  common 
friend,  he  sent  messages  that  were  valuable  beyond  tell- 
ing to  a  young  man  just  beginning  to  write.  But 
Minto's  sympathies  were  always  with  the  young  ;  and, 
indeed,  on  the  first  occasion  that  we  met  this  was  rather 
trying.  In  my  father's  house  the  talk  might  run  on 
statesmen,  divines,  or  men  of  science  ;  but  men  of  let- 
ters were  the  great  men.  Other  callings  were  well 
enough,  but  writers  were  a  class  apart,  and  to  belong  to 
it  was  the  choicest  of  ambitions.  I  had  grown  up  in 
this  habit  of  mind,  and  have  not  yet  entirely  outgrown 
it  ;  so  that  the  prospect  of  seeing  Minto  and  listening 
to  him  fluttered  me,  as  no  doubt  it  flutters  a  young 
curate  to  dine  with  his  bishop.  He  would  not  let  me 
worship,  however  ;  would  not  even  let  me  listen  ;  but 
seemed  only  anxious  to  hear  about  my  own  endeavors 
and  prospects.  I  think  this  forgetfulness  of  self  was 
native  in  him  and  incurable.  Certainly,  though  I 
admired  him  as  much  as  ever,  he  had  won  a  very  much 
warmer  feeling  in  the  inside  of  half  an  hour  ;  and  from 
that  time  was  constantly  adding  to  the  load  of  kindness 
which  now  can  only  be  repaid  by  mourning  his  loss,  and 
remembering  his  wise  counsel  and  encouragement.  No 
other  critic  has  given  me  the  tithe  of  that  counsel  or  a 
hundredth  part  of  that  encouragement.  And  when  I 
say  that  all  this  was  bestowed  at  every  opportunity 
from  the  date  of  our  first  and  only  intimate  conversa- 
tion to  the  time  of  his  death,  that  even  on  his  death- 
bed he  tried  to  do  me  a  last  service  in  the  old  fashion, 
it  will  be  allowed  that  my  burden  of  obligation  is  heavy 
indeed. 

I  cannot  believe  that  the  newspapers  and  reviews 
have  done  justice  to  his  memory.  They  praise  him  as  a 
good  man  and  a  sincere  lover  of  letters  ;  but  the  quality 
of  his  work,  and  especially   of   his  critical  work,  has 


liv  BIOGKAPHICAL   INTRODUCTION 

received  too  little  attention.  For  it  was  of  the  rarest. 
Whatever  his  subject,  Minto  seemed  to  approach  it 
with  a  mind  absolutely  clear  of  prejudice  ;  to  take  it 
up  with  the  single  desire  of  exploring  it  in  his  reader's 
company,  and  to  handle  it  with  a  modest  self-effacement 
that  may  explain  the  slightly  neglectful  attitude  of  a 
generation  eager  to  be  obtruded  on  by  "  striking  per- 
sonalities." In  the  same  way,  though  he  was  one  of 
the  few  men  left  who  could  construct  a  long  English 
sentence,  and  fit  it  with  well-proportioned  members, 
and  make  it  walk  upon  legs,  his  style  was  so  temperate 
and  business-like,  so  admirable  as  a  means  to  an  end, 
and  so  naked  of  ornamentation,  that  it  too  often  passed 
unnoticed.  We  must  be  u  striking  "  in  these  times,  or 
we  are  naught ;  but  this  writer  learned  to  use  his  theme 
as  a  stalking-horse  for  his  own  wit.  He  had  an  insatiable 
interest  in  literature  ;  but  this  interest  was  scientific  as 
well  as  sympathetic  ;  and  he  handled  criticism  scientifi- 
cally. On  the  whole,  his  method  was  that  of  Sainte- 
Beuve,  and,  though  there  are  many  more  showy,  a  better 
has  yet  to  be  invented.  The  others  may  please  for  a 
while  ;  but  in  the  end  we  shall  sigh  for  temperance, 
modesty,  restraint,  the  virtues  that  are  above  fashion, 
and  never,  never  tire  ;  and  where  temperance,  modesty, 
and  restraint  are  valued,  we  may  be  confident  that  Minto 
will  not  be  forgotten.  In  a  series  to  which  all  the  best 
critics  of  his  generation  contributed,  his  monograph  on 
Defoe  stands  out  as  a  bright  example  of  the  way  in 
which  criticism  should  be  written  ;  and  its  excellence 
in  comparison  with  the  majority  grows  clearer  as  time 
goes  on — a  sure  test.  But  whether  in  his  writings  or 
his  life,  Minto  was  a  man  in  whose  company  it  was 
good  to  be,  and  to  remain. 

The  following  appeared  in  The  Westminster 
Gazette  of  March  2 : 


BIOGRAPHICAL   INTRODUCTION  lv 

QUHAT  SAY  THEY  ? 

IN  MEMORIAM  WILLIAM  MINTO.      OBIIT   MARCH   I. 

It  was  his  constant  care  to  make  his  subject,  whether  literature 
or  the  high  and  dry  sands  of  metaphysics,  as  far  as  possible, 
a  mirror  of  the  life  we  live. 

The  hand  that  led  our  pilgrim  bands 

These  by-gone  years 
To  England's  wondrous  lettered  lands, 

Its  kings  and  seers, 
No  more  shall  smooth  the  rugged  way — 
'Tis  cold  this  day. 

In  misty  metaphysic  maze 

He  shed  a  light, 
That  cleared  away  the  hanging  haze 

And  darkening  night. 
But  ne'er  again  shall  he  we  weep 
Our  footsteps  keep. 

Was  it  with  Chaucer's  dukes  and  dames, 

Or  saintly  Bede  ? 
"Was  it  with  Hamiltonian  aims, 

Or  rigid  Reid  ? 
The  by-gone  age  was  lit  with  life, 
Its  flux  and  strife. 

And  still,  he  brought  our  restless  times 

Within  his  ken — 
A  Barrie  or  a  Kipling's  rhymes 

Would  charm  his  pen. 
The  dainty  genius  of  a  "  Q" 
Was  brought  to  view. 

Then  oft  indeed  a  budding  bard, 

As  yet  unknown, 
Who  found  the  way  to  glory  hard, 

He'd  gladly  own  ; 
The  future  way  to  fame  was  cleared, 
The  tyro  cheered. 


lvi  BIOGRAPHICAL    INTRODUCTION 

The  ravelled  skein  of  logic-lore 

We  saw  unwound. 
The  trials  of  the  path  no  more 

The  journey  bound. 
Ah,  who  again  shall  lift  the  thorn 
As  him  we  mourn  ! 

Can  we,  to-day  immersed  in  gloom, 

This  guide  forget, 
Although  by  very  Crack  of  Doom 

We  seem  beset — 
A  halting  tribute  this,  that  sings 
Our  king  at  King's. 

In  the  same  paper,  The  Westminster  Gazette, 
of  March  11,  Minto's  friend,  Mr.  Richard  Le 
Gallienne,  writes  as  follows : 

PROFESSOR  MINTO. 

Nature,  that  makes  Professors  all  day  long, 
And,  filling  idle  souls  with  idle  song, 
Turns  out  small  Poets  every  other  minute, 
Made  earth  for  men,  but  seldom  puts  men  in  it. 

Ah  !  Minto,  thou  of  that  minority 
Wert  man  of  men,  we  had  deep  need  of  thee  ! 
Had  Heaven  a  deeper  ?    Did  the  heavenly  Chair 
Of  earthly  Love  wait  empty  for  thee  there  ? 

I  may  perhaps  be  allowed  to  repeat,  at  the 
close  of  this  introductory  and  biographic  sketch, 
that  there  is  ample  and  most  valuable  material 
for  a  sequel  volume  of  Minto's  work,  including 
his  numerous  "  Encyclopaedia  Britannica"  arti- 
cles, his  papers  on  John  Donne,  Wordsworth, 
and  Matthew  Arnold,  as  well  as  those  delight- 
ful lectures  which  he  gave  to  literary  and  other 

Societies  in  Scotland. 

William  Knight. 

St.  Andrews,  June,  1894. 


THE  LITERATURE 

OF 

THE    GEORGIAN    ERA 


CHAPTER  I 

THE  POSITION   OF   MEN   OF   LETTERS   IN  THE  EIGHTEENTH 

CENTURY 

DECLINE  OF  ROYAL  PATRONAGE — WHY  IS  THE  GEORGIAN  ERA 
A  DISTINCT  LITERARY  PERIOD  ? — CONDITION  OF  POETRY  DUR- 
ING THE  CENTURY,  AND  VIEWS  OF  ITS  CRITICS  AS  TO  THE 
MEANING  OF  NATURE 

The  combined  reigns  of  the  four  Georges  may  pos- 
sibly he  thought  an  arbitrary  and  artificial  section  of 
literary  history  to  choose  as  a  subject  for  a  course  of 
lectures.  What  had  the  four  Georges  to  do  with 
literature  ?  is  a  question  that  naturally  occurs  when 
they  are  proposed  as  the  figure-heads  of  a  literary 
period  ;  and  the  answer  must  be  that  they  had  little 
or  nothing  to  do  with  literature  beyond  occasionally 
furnishing  in  their  illustrious  persons  fairly  good 
themes  for  the  humorist  and  the  satirist.  If  you  read 
Thackeray  on  the  four  Georges,  you  will  see  that  these 
reigns  supplied  ample  materials  both  for  the  laughing 
philosopher  and  the  weeping  philosopher.  But  neither 
of  the  first  two  Georges  cared  for  literature,  or  did  any 
thing  directly  to  encourage  literature,  and  it  was  per- 
haps as  well  that  they  let  it  alone.  Matters  mended 
a  little  under  the  second  two.  George  IV.  had  an 
interview  with  Dr.  Johnson,  the  record  of  which  is  one 


2        MEN    OF    LETTERS    IN    TIIE    EIGHTEENTH    CENTURY 

of  the  best  known  passages  in  Boswell's  "  Life."  But 
this  was  after  Dr.  Johnson's  fame  was  fully  established. 
The  most  conspicuous  instance  of  royal  patronage  of 
literature  in  these  reigns — patronage  that  really  helped 
a  rising  man — occurred  in  the  first  year  of  this  century, 
when  the  Prince  who  afterward  became  George  IV. 
put  down  his  name  among  the  subscribers  to  Thomas 
Moore's  translation  of  Anacreon,  and  admitted  the 
youthful  poet  to  the  honor  of  personal  acquaintance. 
Moore  was  overjoyed  at  this  piece  of  good  fortune  ; 
and  well  he  might  be,  for  it  greatly  helped  him  in  his 
career  of  fashionable  popularity.  In  a  sense  it  may  be 
said  that  literature  owes  the  anacreontic  lays  of  Tom 
Little  to  royal  favor  ;  and  this  is  its  only  obligation  to 
the  favor  of  the  four  Georges — an  obligation  that  can- 
not be  thought  of  with  altogether  unmingled  gratitude. 
The  Georges  did  little  or  nothing  for  literature.  But, 
though  it  looks  like  a  paradox,  this  fact,  so  far  from 
being  a  reason  against  choosing  their  reigns  as  a  liter- 
ary period,  is  one  of  the  reasons  why  the  accession  of 
the  dynasty  constitutes  a  material  point  of  departure 
for  a  historical  survey.  There  is  a  certain  interest  in 
seeing  how  literature  prospered  when  it  was  no  longer 
sunned  by  the  royal  countenance,  and  what  new 
influences  came  in  to  compensate  the  loss.  Up  to  the 
time  of  the  first  George  every  eminent  man  of  letters  had 
received  direct  encouragement  from  the  Court.  In  the 
fourteenth  and  fifteenth  centuries  literature  was  almost 
entirely  dependent  on  royal  favor,  and  there  was 
always  some  member  of  the  royal  family  who  took  a 
warm  interest  in  letters.  In  the  time  of  Edward  III. 
Chaucer  was  patronized  by  John  of  Gaunt,  taken  into 
the  royal  household,  and  rewarded  with  lucrative  public 
appointments.  Gower  undertook  his  most  celebrated 
poem  at  the  personal  request  of  Richard  II.  One  of 
the  first  cares  of  Henry  IV.  when  he  usurped  the 
Crown  was  to  remember  and  provide  for  the  wants  of 


COURT    INFLUENCE    UPON   LITERATURE  3 

his  father's  old  favorite,  the  poet  of  the  "Canterbury 
Tales."  The  ladies  of  this  royal  house  connected  their 
memories  with  all  that  was  best  in  the  literature  of  the 
time.  Lady  Jane  Beaufort,  granddaughter  of  John  of 
Gaunt,  inspired  the  author  of  the  "  King's  Quhair." 
Her  niece,  the  Countess  of  Pembroke,  mother  of 
Henry  VII.,  was  the  principal  promoter  of  learning 
in  her  generation.  Margaret,  the  sister  of  Edward  IV., 
who  married  the  Duke  of  Burgundy,  encouraged  Cax- 
ton  in  the  literary  enterprise  which  led  to  the  intro- 
duction of  printing  into  England.  Another  Margai'et, 
daughter  of  Henry  VII.,  by  her  marriage  with  James 
IV.  of  Scotland  gave  a  new  tone  to  the  poetry  of  the 
Scottish  Court.  I  need  not  give  examples  of  the 
influence  of  the  Court  in  literature  during  the  sixteenth 
and  seventeenth  centuries.  The  circle  of  education 
began  to  widen  very  rapidly  after  the  introduction  of 
the  printing-press,  and  the  creative  faculty  was  brought 
within  the  reach  of  many  and  diverse  incitements  to 
produce ;  capitalists  pressed  forward  eager  to  divine 
and  satisfy  the  new  demands  ;  but  among  the  diverse 
influences  on  literary  production  one  was  always  con- 
spicuous, the  influence  of  the  Court.  Even  when,  as  in 
the  case  of  the  great  Shakespearian  dramatic  literature, 
writers  did  not  receive  their  first  impulse  from  the  Court, 
the  Court  hastened  to  put  the  seal  of  its  approbation 
on  the  new  product.  It  was  an  entirely  novel  and 
unprecedented  situation  when  the  throne  was  filled  by 
a  king  who  could  hardly  speak  a  word  of  English,  and 
who  was  entirely  destitute  of  interest  in  English  or  any 
other  literature  ;  and  it  cannot  but  be  interesting  to 
examine  what  effect,  if  any,  this  circumstance  had  on 
literary  production.  At  an  earlier  stage  of  literary 
history,  in  an  earlier  state  of  civilization,  the  with- 
drawal of  royal  patronage  would  have  been  like 
the  withdrawal  of  the  sun  from  the  solar  sj'stem.  Did 
it  produce  any  perceptible  effect  on  the  literature  of 


4        MEN    OP   LETTERS    IN   THE    EIGHTEENTH    CENTURY 

the  eighteenth  century?  It  did  not  ;  the  centre  of 
literary  life  and  heat  had  shifted  ;  where,  then,  are  we 
to  look  for  this  centre  ? 

The  mere  fact  that  the  personal  tastes  of  the  king  and 
his  intimate  circle  ceased  to  have  any  directing  influ- 
ence on  literature  would  alone  make  the  Hanoverian 
accession  a  notable  literary  epoch.  But  this  event 
affected  literature  much  more  profoundly  in  another 
way — namely,  by  putting  an  end  to  a  long  period  of 
political  uncertainty.  The  settlement  of  the  long-vexed 
question  of  the  succession  to  the  Crown  made  a  change 
in  the  position  of  the  man  of  letters  that  can  only 
be  described  as  a  revolution.  A  long  explanation  is 
required  to  enable  you  to  understand  the  full  signifi- 
cance of  this  change,  unless  you  happen  to  be  versed 
in  the  history  of  the  period.  First,  you  must  take 
notice  of  the  means  by  which  public  opinion  in  those 
days  was  appealed  to.  There  was  no  reporting  of 
political  speeches  ;  there  were  no  daily  newspapers  with 
leading  articles  ;  every  thing  was  done  by  means  of 
occasional  pamphlets  in  prose  or  verse.  Nowadays,  if 
you  wish  to  know  the  minds  of  the  leaders  of  opinion 
you  read  the  magazines  and  the  leading  articles  in  the 
newspapers.  But  in  the  time  of  Queen  Anne,  and  for 
half  a  century  before,  the  work  of  expressing  and  en- 
lightening opinion  was  carried  on  by  means  of  pamph- 
lets. Whenever  the  public  mind  was  excited  on  any 
question, — a  war,  or  a  parliamentary  election,  or  a  great 
commercial  enterprise,  or  a  disastrous  calamity, — swarms 
of  such  pamphlets  poured  from  the  press  ;  and  if  the 
public  excitement  ran  high  and  the  pamphlet  was 
effectively  written,  it  was  sold  in  the  shops  and  hawked 
about  the  streets  in  thousands.  Next,  you  must  take 
notice  of  the  character  of  the  great  political  question 
of  the  time — the  succession  to  the  kingdom.  From 
the  Revolution  of  1688  to  the  accession  of  George  I. 
the  succession  was  uncertain.     The  nation  was  divided 


COURT    INFLUENCE    UPON   LITERATURE  5 

into  two  great  parties  of  Whig  and  Tory,  the  one  eager 
to  keep  out,  the  other  to  bring  back,  the  exiled  family 
of   Stewarts.      Cart-loads   of  pamphlets   were   written 
to  work  on  the  public  mind  for  the  one  purpose  or  the 
other.     It  is  difficult  for  us  in  these  days  to  understand 
the    intense,   absorbing,   passionate    character    of   the 
political  struggles  that   went  on  while  the  succession 
lay  in  dispute  and  uncertainty.     A  few  years  ago  there 
was  not  a  little  excitement  in   this  country  over  the 
Eastern    Question.     There   were  public   meetings   and 
speeches  and  articles  without  end  ;    sides    were  taken 
with  considerable  earnestness   and  warmth.      But  the 
heat  of  a  struggle  is  always  in  proportion  to  the  impor- 
tance for  the  combatants  of  the  issue  at  stake  ;  and  no 
issue  raised  then  could  come  home  to  the  electors  with 
one-tenth  of  the  force  of  the  momentous  question,  who 
should  be  the  king  of  the  country.     The  power  of  the 
Crown  was  great  in  those  days  ;  and  the  leaders  in  the 
dispute   about    the  succession   fought   with   the   fierce 
earnestness  of  men   whose  whole  fortunes   are  bound 
up  with  the   issue.     Their  properties,  and   even  their 
lives,  were  at  stake  as  well  as  their  political  power.     If 
they   took   an   active  part   on  one  side  or   the  other, 
degradation,  impoverishment,  exile,  even  death,  might 
follow  upon  failure.     Triumph   meant  honors,  wealth, 
and   power ;    defeat   might   mean     forfeiture   of   their 
estates  and  banishment.     Such  were  the  high  stakes  for 
which  the  leaders  were  playing  ;  and  for  the  common 
people  also  the  political  struggle  was  intensely  exciting. 
It  was  in  great  part  a  religious   question  with  them; 
encouragement,   toleration,    persecution,   awaited   their 
doctrines  and  forms  of  worship  according  as  a  Protes- 
tant or  a  Papist  filled  the  throne  ;  and  their  feelings 
were  thus  profoundly  interested.     No  such  issues  hang 
upon  political  struggles  now,  and  the  passion  of  the  con- 
flict, however  earnest  and  determined,  can  never  reach 
the  same  pitch  of  absorbing  intensity. 


6        MEN    OF   LETTERS    IN    THE    EIGHTEENTH    CENTURY 

This,  then,  being  the  state  of  things,  the  leading  com- 
batants deeply  in  earnest,  the  public  mind  quick  and 
susceptible,  every  incident  closely  watched  and  sharply 
taken  advantage  of,  and  pamphlets  the  recognized  means 
of  working  on  public  opinion,  what  was  the  effect  on 
literature  ?  The  political  situation  had  a  direct  and 
immediate  effect  on  the  position  of  men  of  letters.  The 
man  who  could  write  pamphlets,  whether  in  prose  or  in 
verse,  at  once  became  a  person  of  importance.  Men  of 
letters  were  sought  after,  caressed,  rewarded, — we  must 
not  say  bribed, — as  they  had  never  been  before  by  am- 
bitious politicians  and  grasping  Ministers.  Versifiers 
were  in  especial  demand,  and,  of  course,  the  patrons 
were  met  half-way.  Young  gentlemen  at  the  Universi- 
ties, with  an  elegant  knack  of  versification,  celebrated 
birthdays  and  battles,  and  even  party  triumphs  in  Parlia- 
ment, and  sent  their  effusions  to  the  powerful,  in  the 
hope  of  being  rewarded  by  solid  appointments  in  the 
public  service,  of  course  irrespective  of  special  fitness. 
The  splendid  successes  of  a  few  helped  to  crowd  this 
avenue  to  fame  and  fortune.  You  all  know  the  story 
of  Addison  and  his  poem  on  the  battle  of  Blenheim  ; 
how  the  Lord  Treasurer  Godolphin  complained  to  Lord 
Halifax  of  the  poor  quality  of  the  poems  generally 
written  on  such  occasions,  how  Halifax  said  that  he 
knew  of  a  young  poet  who  could  do  better,  how  a  noble- 
man was  sent  to  Addison's  garret  in  the  Hay  market  to 
solicit  his  services,  and  how  munificently  the  poet  was 
recompensed  with  public  appointments.  This  story  is 
familiar,  but  it  is  only  the  most  striking  one  of  scores 
of  a  similar  kind  in  Johnson's  Lives  of  the  Poets  of  that 
time.  Addison  himself,  earlier  in  his  career,  when  he  was 
fresh  from  the  University,  was  rewarded  with  a  pension 
of  three  hundred  pounds  for  a  poem  on  the  Peace  of  Rys- 
wick.  Lord  Halifax,  the  patron  who  helped  him  to  the 
favor  of  the  Crown,  himself  owed  his  first  advancement 
to  literature.     When  plain  Charles  Montagu,  he  had  co- 


LITERATURE    LIBERALLY    REWARDED  7 

operated  with  Prior  in  writing  the  political  satire  of 
"The  Town  Mouse  and  the  Country  Mouse."  He  was 
afterward  introduced  to  King  William  with  the  words  : 
"Sir,  I  have  brought  &  mouse  to  wait  on  your  Majesty." 
"  You  do  well  to  put  me  in  the  way  of  making  a  man 
of  him,"  the  king  is  said  to  have  replied,  and  forthwith 
ordei'ed  him  a  pension  of  five  hundred  pounds.  Montagu's 
collaborator,  Prior,  was  made  secretary  to  an  embassy. 
The  political  hits  in  his  tragedy  of  "  Tamerlane  "  obtained 
for  Rowe  an  under-secretaryship  in  the  Treasury;  Hughes 
obtained  a  place  in  the  office  of  Ordnance  for  an  ode  on 
the  Peace  of  Ryswick  ;  Dr.  Blackmore's  indirect  compli- 
ments to  the  king  in  his  "  Prince  Arthur "  procured 
him  a  knighthood  and  the  post  of  royal  physician. 
And  so  on  and  so  on  throughout  the  reigns  of  William 
and  Anne.  Places  of  all  kinds  in  the  gift  of  the 
Ministers  of  the  Crown  were  freely  distributed  among 
men  of  letters,  without  the  slightest  regard  to  any 
qualification  except  their  power  of  making  men  and 
measures  popular  by  direct  and  indirect  panegyric. 

The  effect  of  this  extensive  patronage  on  the  character 
of  Queen  Anne  poetry,  on  the  poetry  as  poetry,  we  shall 
try  to  trace  afterward  ;  meantime,  I  wish  to  make  clear 
the  position  of  men  of  letters  before  the  accession  of 
George  I.,  and  how  completely  this  position  was  changed 
by  the  settlement  of  the  disputed  succession.  Observe 
that  the  patronage  of  literature  was  not  disinterested. 
The  great  office  of  the  best  literature  is  to  elevate, 
strengthen,  gladden,  and  purify  human  life,  to  expand 
the  soul,  to  quicken  the  fancy,  to  enlarge  the  under- 
standing, to  lift  the  mind  out  of  the  narrow  round  of 
personal  concerns  and  enable  it  to  command  a  wider 
horizon.  It  was  not  to  enable  men  of  letters  to  fulfil 
this  mission  that  the  Ministers  of  King  William  and  of 
Queen  Anne  lavished  places  and  pensions  on  them.  It 
was  purely  as  party  writers  that  they  were  patronized, 
as   brilliant    political    pamphleteers,   useful    rhetorical 


8        MEN    OF    LETTERS    IN    THE    EIGHTEENTH    CENTURY 

panegyrists  and  biting  satirists  ;  and  when  tlie  need  for 
their  services  passed  away,  the  fountains  of  patronage 
were  dried  up.  Very  soon  after  George's  accession  it 
was  apparent  that  the  golden  age  was  at  an  end.  The 
batch  of  Whig  poets  who  had  remained  faithful  during 
the  Tory  Ministry  of  Queen  Anne's  last  four  years, — 
Addison,  Steele,  Rowe,  Tate,  Tickell,  and  other  minor 
celebrities, — were  munificently  provided  for  in  the  first 
blush  of  the  Whig  triumph,  but  this  was  practically  the 
last  of  the  system.  When  Sir  Robert  Walpole  got  the 
reins  of  power  firmly  in  his  hands,  and  settled  down 
into  his  policy  of  establishing  the  dynasty  by  peaceful 
measures,  he  saw  that  the  poets,  powerful  enough  agents 
in  a  time  of  warlike  excitement,  could  be  of  little  service 
to  him,  and  he  turned  the  golden  stream  from  the  Royal 
Treasury  in  another  direction.  Another  circumstance 
helped  to  destroy  the  influence  of  the  brilliant  occasional 
writer,  the  rapid  development  of  the  periodical  press,  of 
newspapers  and  political  journals.  This  was  almost 
coincident  with  the  accession  of  George  I.  There  had 
been  newspapers  in  the  land  from  the  time  of  the  great 
Civil  War,  and  regular  political  periodicals  were  estab- 
lished in  the  reign  of  Queen  Anne,  the  first  being 
Defoe's  celebrated  Review  ;  but  the  chronicling  of 
news  and  the  expression  of  opinion  were  distinct  func- 
tions, left  to  different  organs.  Such  sheets  as  the 
Flying  Post  and  the  Mercury  gave  nothing  but  news  ; 
the  Tatler  and  the  Spectator  were  confined  to  social 
essays  ;  the  Examiner  and  the  Whig  Examiner,  Mer- 
cator  and  the  British  Merchant,  were  purely  political 
journals.  The  newspapers  strictly  so-called  were  not 
impartial ;  they  were  in  the  pay  of  different  parties, 
and  their  intelligence  was  garbled  in  different  interests  ; 
but  they  expressed  no  opinions,  and  it  was  only  by  the 
manipulation  of  news  that  they  sought  to  influence  the 
opinions  of  their  readers.  The  "  leading  article,"  or 
"  letter  introductory,"  as  it  was  at  first  called, — a  pref- 


VENALITY    OF   NEWSPAPERS    AND   JOURNALISTS  9 

atory  dissertation  intended  to  lead  the  readers  to  cer- 
tain conclusions, — was  the  invention  of  the  acute  genius 
of  Defoe  early  in  the  reign  of  George  I.  From  that 
time  various  news-journals  began  to  retain  a  letter-writer, 
as  the  writer  of  leading  articles  was  then  called,  and 
journalism  became  a  distinct  occupation.  Much  of  the 
public  money  that  had  gone  in  the  reign  of  Queen 
Anne  to  the  occasional  pamphleteer  now  found  its  way 
to  the  pockets  of  the  professional  journalist.  It  was  a 
corrupt  time,  measured  by  our  modern  ideas  of  literary 
independence.  Walpole,  a  hard,  unsentimental  man  of 
business,  who  believed  in  paying  for  services  directly  in 
solid  cash,  is  said  to  have  paid  £50,000  in  ten  years  to 
the  literary  supporters  of  his  administration  ;  and  one 
of  them,  Arnall,  a  journalist  whose  name  you  will  find  in 
no  history  of  literature,  boasted  that  he  had  received  in 
three  years  no  less  a  sum  than  £10,997,  6s.  8d.  When 
we  compare  Walpole's  system  of  securing  literary  sup- 
port for  his  measures  with  that  prevalent  in  the  time 
of  Queen  Anne,  we  are  compelled  to  admit  that  the 
great  political  patrons  of  the  earlier  period,  Somers  and 
Halifax,  and  Oxford  and  Bolingbroke,  did  have  some 
respect  for  literature  as  literature,  and  took  a  certain 
pride  in  playing  the  role  of  Maecenas,  altogether  apart 
from  their  sense  of  the  political  advantages  of  having 
men  of  letters  on  their  side. 

The  great  change  effected  in  the  position  of  men  of 
letters  at  the  accession  of  George  I.  is,  then,  a  solid 
reason  for  beginning  a  literary  survey  from  that  date. 
But  the  reign  of  the  four  Georges  really  owes  its  com- 
pleteness as  a  literary  period  to  an  accident.  It  so  hap- 
pened that  Pope's  masterpiece,  the  "  Rape  of  the  Lock," 
was  published  in  its  complete  form  in  the  first  year  of 
the  first  George  ;  while  the  last  year  of  the  last  George 
witnessed  the  publication  of  his  first  volume  of  poems 
by  our  late  Poet-Laureate,  Lord  Tennyson.  We  thus 
find  at  the  beginning  of  our  period  the  leader  of  one 


10      MEN    OF   LETTERS   IN   THE    EIGHTEENTH    CENTURY 

great  school  of  poetry  in  the  full  blaze  of  his  reputation  ; 
and  at  the  end  the  dawn  of  another  great  luminary  and 
the  foundation  of  a  new  school.  What  had  poetry 
gained  in  the  interval — an  interval  containing  the 
splendid  poetic  achievements  of  the  first  quarter  of  the 
nineteenth  century,  with  the  great  names  of  Words- 
worth and  Coleridge,  and  Scott  and  Byron,  and  Keats 
and  Shelley  ?  At  first  sight  it  might  seem  as  if  there 
had  been  only  a  full  circle  revolution  of  a  fixed  wheel, 
an  oscillation  of  a  pendulum  to  and  fro — as  if  poetry  had 
only  moved  from  the  elaborate  artistic  care  of  Pope  to 
the  freedom  and  spontaneity  of  Wordsworth  and  Byron, 
and  back  to  the  elaborate  art  of  Tennyson.  But  there 
was  a  real  progression.  Tennyson  embodies  new  poetic 
ideals  in  his  art,  and  these  ideals  were  conceived  and 
shaped  in  the  interval  between  him  and  Pope.  The  age 
of  Wordsworth  and  Byron  was  not  only  a  season  of 
great  creative  energy,  but  also  a  season  of  vivid  and 
searching  criticism.  Not  only  were  new  masterpieces 
produced,  but  new  life  was  given  to  the  discussion  of 
the  first  principles  of  the  art  of  Poetry.  And  not  only 
were  the  technicalities  of  poetry  discussed — publicly 
discussed — by  some  of  the  leading  masters  in  the  art, 
the  principles  of  diction,  metre,  imagery,  and  general 
construction,  as  had  been  done  by  hundreds  of  writers 
on  the  art  of  Poetry  from  Aristotle  and  Horace  down 
to  the  Duke  of  Buckingham  and  Mr.  Hayley,  but  new 
topics  were  introduced,  and  chief  among  them  the  nature 
of  the  poetic  faculty,  and  the  principles  on  which  rank 
should  be  assigned  to  poets  in  their  various  degrees  as 
spiritual  benefactors  of  mankind.  Wordsworth  led  the 
way  both  in  creation  and  in  criticism.  Wordsworth  was 
by  no  means  the  most  popular  poet  in  his  generation, 
he  had  by  no  means  the  most  powerful  influence  on  the 
public,  but  he  had  unquestionably  of  all  men  in  his 
generation  the  greatest  influence  on  men  of  letters,  on 
the  producers  of  poetry.     It  is,  to  use  the  language  of 


macaulay's  criticism  op  pope  11 

political  economy,  among  the  manufacturers  and  not 
the  consumers  of  poetry  that  his  influence  is  to  be  traced, 
and  upon  them  it  was  enormous.  For  us,  as  students 
of  poetry,  the  most  significant  and  instructive  fact  in 
the  reign  of  the  four  Georges  is  the  gradual  rise  of  the 
reputation  of  Wordsworth,  and  the  gradual  fall  of  the 
reputation  of  Pope.  About  the  close  of  the  reign  of 
George  IV.  the  reputation  of  Wordsworth  had  reached 
its  zenith  ;  the  reputation  of  Pope,  supreme  and 
unchallenged  throughout  the  eighteenth  century,  had 
fallen  to  its  nadir.  We  may  fairly  take  Macaulay's 
essay  on  Byron,  published  in  1831,  as  marking  the  tri- 
umph of  the  Wordsworthian  school.  This  essay,  written 
with  all  the  energy  of  Macaulay's  brilliant  rhetoric,  laid 
hold  of  what  had  before  been  little  more  than  an  esoteric 
doctrine,  and  spread  it  far  and  wide  over  the  public  mind. 
Macaulay  danced  a  sort  of  breakdown  over  the  prostrate 
body  of  the  great  poet  of  the  eighteenth  century.  He 
concentrated  and  emphasized  all  that  had  been  said  in 
disparagement  of  Pope.  Pope  had  no  imagination  in 
the  highest  sense  ;  he  had  no  correctness  in  the  highest 
sense  ;  he  was  a  painstaking  slave  to  artificial  rules  ;  his 
poetry  was  like  a  trimly  kept  garden,  with  smooth- 
shaven  grass,  flower-beds  in  geometrical  figures,  sym- 
metrical walks  and  terraces,  and  pillars  and  urns  and 
statues,  and  trees  and  hedges  clipped  into  unnatural 
shapes.  Hundreds  of  writers  since  Macaulay  have  re- 
peated his  comparison  of  Pope's  poetry  to  a  trim  gar- 
den, and  have  said  after  him  that  such  poetry  could  be 
enjoyed  only  in  an  age  of  hoops  and  periwigs.  For  the 
last  fifty  years  Macaulay's  vigorous  caricature  has  domi- 
nated the  public  opinion  about  Pope.  Pope's  faults  have 
been  put  in  the  foreground  ;  his  merits  have  been 
admitted  grudgingly  ;  his  admirers  have  been  obliged 
to  adopt  an  apologetic  tone. 

Pope,  then,  was  the  hero  of  the  first  part  of  our  period, 
and  the   dethroned  idol  of   its  closing   years,  knocked 


12      MEN    OP   LETTERS    IN   THE    EIGHTEENTH    CENTURY 

from  his  pedestal  and  rolled  in  the  dust.     Ought  he  to 
be  set  up  again  ?     Not  all  the  king's  horses,  nor  all  the 
king's  men,  could  restore  him  to  the  place  that  he  once 
occupied  in  public   estimation,  side   by   side   with   the 
greatest   men   in    literature.     But,  on   the  other  hand, 
there  can  be  no  doubt  that  the  reaction  against  him  in 
public  estimation  was  carried  much  too  far.     His  rank 
in  public  estimation — I  wish  to  lay  emphasis  on  that 
expression  ;  for,  paradoxical  as  it  may  seem,  I  believe 
that  among  the  few  who  make  poetry  a  serious  study — 
and  there  were  such  men  in  the  eighteenth  century  as 
well  as  in  the  nineteenth  (Macaulay  cannot  be  included 
in  the  number) — there    has  been  no   substantial  oscil- 
lation of  opinion  about  the  merits  of  Pope.     They  have 
felt  that  his  range  of  subjects  was  limited,  and  that  his 
power  of  expression  was  not  of  the  very  highest,  but 
that  within  his  limits  and  the  measure  of  his  power  his 
execution    was  of   unrivalled   brilliancy.     Wordsworth 
and   Coleridge   felt  and   acknowledged    this,  if  not  as 
heartily,  at  least  as  explicitly,  as  Byron  and  Campbell. 
It  is  true  that  Wordsworth  and  Coleridge  and  other 
disciples  had  not  the  same  full  sympathy  with  Pope's 
subject-matter,    and    consequently   were  less   hearty  in 
their  acknowledgment  of  his  excellences,  and  more   dis- 
posed to  dwell  upon  his  defects.     Byron,  who  had  tried 
his  hand  at  satire,  was  more  forward  to  acknowledge 
the  brilliant  point  and  masterly  condensation  of  Pope's 
work.     But   they   were   in    substantial    agreement    in- 
tellectually.    They  knew   equally  well    where    Pope's 
strength  lay,  and  where  his  weakness  lay.     They  knew 
the  master's  hand,  and  they  drew  the  line  at  its  limita- 
tions.    There  was  no  such  nice  discrimination,  however, 
in   the  public  estimation    of  the  poet,  based  upon  the 
treatment  of  him  by   poetical   and  critical  authorities. 
The  general  easy-going  reader  who  does  not,  in  Words- 
worth's   language,    make    poetry    a   study,    knows   no 
middle  station  between  good  and  bad,  between  admi- 


CRITICISM    OF    EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY    POETS  13 

rable  and  the  reverse.  He  either  admires  heartily  or  he 
is  wholly  uninterested  and  contemptuous.  And  in  so 
far  as  he  is  influenced  by  authority,  he  is  apt  to  be 
wholly  led  away  by  what  is  put  in  the  foreground,  to 
look  at  this  only,  and  neglect  the  qualifications  ranged 
in  the  middle  distance  and  the  background.  Thus  it 
happened  that  when  Wordsworth's  school,  who  put 
Pope's  defects  and  limitations  in  the  foreground,  became 
the  leaders  of  critical  opinion,  the  hero  of  the  eigh- 
teenth century  was  thrown  from  his  pedestal  in  public 
estimation.  It  is  a  most  difficult  thing  to  gauge  public 
opinion  ;  but  a  very  fair  test  of  it,  as  regards  either 
men  or  measures,  is  to  be  found  in  the  attitude  of 
moderate  advocates.  If  moderate  advocates  are  apolo- 
getic and  conciliatory,  the  man  or  the  measure,  we  may 
be  sure,  does  not  stand  high  in  the  estimation  of  the 
public  addressed.  Now,  applying  this  principle  in  the 
case  of  Pope,  we  find  that  in  the  eighteenth  century, 
before  his  poetry  had  passed  through  the  crucible  of  the 
Wordsworthian  school,  such  a  moderate  critic  as  Joseph 
Warton  had  to  be  cautious  in  hinting  at  defects  ; 
whereas  in  recent  years  such  temperate  admirers  as  Mr. 
Carruthers  or  Mr.  Mark  Pattison  have  to  guard  them- 
selves carefully  against  the  charge  of  putting  Pope's 
merits  too  high.  Such  incidents  as  these  are  significant 
of  Pope's  changed  position  between  the  accession  of  the 
first  George  and  the  demise  of  the  last.  He  had  fallen 
immeasurably  in  public  estimation,  and  he  was  rated 
much  below  his  deserts. 

Now,  although  it  is  impossible  ever  to  restore  Pope 
to  the  position  he  once  occupied,  it  is  our  business  here 
to  try  to  obtain  just  ideas  about  poets,  and  to  sweep 
away  from  our  minds  all  artificial  impediments  to  the 
enjoyment  of  various  kinds  and  degrees  of  excellence  in 
poetry — to  clear  our  minds  of  prejudice  and  look  at 
poets  fairly  for  ourselves.  The  disciples  of  Wordsworth 
and  Coleridge,  in  their  wholesale  condemnation  of  the 


14      MEN    OF   LETTERS    IN    THE    EIGHTEENTH    CENTURY 

poetry  of  the  eighteenth  century,  have  fixed  in  the 
public  mind  a  great  many  erroneous  conceptions.  We 
shall  endeavor  to  see  for  ourselves,  taking  them  one  by 
one,  what  manner  of  men  the  eighteenth-century  poets 
were,  what  aspirations  they  had  in  their  art,  and  how 
their  aspirations  were  limited  by  their  personal  character 
and  circumstances,  and  by  the  circumstances  of  their 
times,  especially  by  the  ruling  traditions  of  poetry  in 
their  respective  generations. 

A  very  common  impression  about  the  poets  of  the 
eighteenth  century  is  that  they  lived  in  slavish  subjec- 
tion to  a  set  of  narrow  and  exclusive  rules  of  criticism  ; 
that  they  had  no  love  for  nature,  either  in  scenery  or  in 
human  affections  or  passions — a  finicking  race  of  artists, 
conventional  and  artificial,  shuddering  at  Shakespeare  as 
a  wild  and  irregular  genius,  or,  as  Voltaire  called  him, 
an  untutored  savage.  Now,  if,  with  these  prepossessions 
in  your  minds,  you  take  up  any  eighteenth-century  poet 
of  rank,  from  Pope  down  to  Hayley,  one  of  George 
III.'s  laureates,  who  represents  the  low-water  mark  of 
eighteenth-century  poetry,  and  if  you  read  the  language 
in  which  they  speak  of  nature  and  of  Shakespeare,  you 
will  open  your  eyes  in  astonishment.  Take,  for  example, 
the  following  passage  : 

"A  tree  is  a  nobler  object  than  a  prince  in  his  coronation  robes. 
Education  leads  us  from  the  admiration  of  beauty  in  natural 
objects  to  the  admiration  of  artificial  or  customary  excellence.  I 
do  not  doubt  but  that  a  thoroughbred  lady  might  admire  the 
stars  because  they  twinkle  like  so  many  candles  on  a  birthnight." 

This  is  an  extract  not  from  "Wordsworth,  but  from 
Spence's  record  of  the  conversation  of  Pope,  of  the  poet 
whose  poetry  is  compared  to  an  artificial  garden,  and 
whose  narrow  and  exclusive  authority  stifled  the  imagi- 
nation of  the  eighteenth  century.  The  irony  of  Ma- 
caulay's  comparison  of  Pope's  poetry  to  an  artificial 
garden  lies  in  the  fact  that  Pope  had  more  to  do  than 


POPE'S    CRITICISM    OF   SHAKESPEARE'S    STYLE  15 

any  one  else  in  destroying  the  fashion  of  artificial  garden- 
ing in  England,  not  merely  by  his  ridicule  of  it,  but  by 
leading  the  new  fashion  of  landscape  gardening,  in 
which  a  closer  attempt  is  made  to  reproduce  natural 
beauties.  But,  at  least,  it  will  be  said,  Pope  spoke  dis- 
paragingly of  Shakespeare.  Read  the  preface  to  his  edi- 
tion of  Shakespeare,  for  he  took  some  trouble  in  editing 
Shakespeare,  and  you  will  see.  It  is  true  he  once 
remarked  to  Spence  that  "  it  was  mighty  simple  in  Rowe 
to  write  a  play  professedly  in  Shakespeare's  style — that 
is,  professedly  in  the  style  of  a  bad  age."  But  we  must 
remember  what  it  was  in  the  style  of  Shakespeare's  age 
that  he  considered  bad.  The  particulars  that  he  speci- 
fied as  faults  were  such  as  have  universally  been  con- 
sidered faults  of  style,  and  such  as  no  writer  has  ever 
tried  to  imitate  without  making  himself  ridiculous. 
For  example,  Pope  said  that  "Shakespeare  generally 
used  to  stiffen  his  style  with  high  words  and  metaphors 
for  the  speeches  of  kings  and  great  men  :  he  mistook  it 
for  a  sign  of  greatness.  This  is  strongest  in  his  early 
plays  ;  but  in  his  very  last,  his  '  Othello,'  what  a  forced 
language  has  he  put  into  the  mouth  of  his  Duke  of 
Venice."  Now,  it  was  probably  not  from  mistaking  it 
for  a  mark  of  greatness  that  Shakespeare  stiffened  his 
words  in  the  speeches  of  great  men,  but  because  his 
audience  expected  it,  because  the  stage  demanded  it  ; 
still,  whatever  the  reason,  take  any  great  man's  speech 
in  Shakespeare  where  the  situation  is  not  filled  with  pas- 
sion, and  I  think  you  will  agree  with  the  eighteenth- 
centuiy  critic  that  no  style  could  be  more  intolerably 
bad.  Do  you  ever  at  the  theatre  now  listen  to  such 
speeches  as  those  of  the  Duke  of  Venice,  and  what 
impression  do  they  make  upon  you  ? 

No  :  though  Pope  often  heard  his  own  age  described 
as  the  Augustan  age  of  English  poetry,  in  which  the  art 
had  been  carried  to  a  perfection  unattained  before,  he 
was   by  no   means   insensible   to  the  greatness   of   his 


16      MEN   OF   LETTERS   IN   THE    EIGHTEENTH    CENTURY 

great  predecessors,  Chaucer,  Spenser,  Shakespeare,  and 
Milton.  His  conversations  with  Spence  *  afford  abun- 
dant evidence  of  his  catholicity  as  well  as  of  his  delicacy 
of  judgment ;  and  if  we  pass  from  Pope  to  his  successors 
in  the  eighteenth  century,  we  find  that  we  cannot  num- 
ber disrespect  for  Shakespeare  among  the  causes  of 
their  poetic  degeneracy,  and  that  Nature  was  often  in 
their  mouths,  if  not  in  their  hearts,  as  the  great  original 
from  which  the  poet  ought  to  draw.  Their  adoration 
of  Shakespeare  is  not  exceeded  by  the  most  reverential 
and  least  critical  member  of  the  New  Shakespeare 
Society.  Take  Akenside,  for  example.  When  in  1749 
a  French  company  played  by  subscription  at  Drury 
Lane,  Akenside  penned  a  most  spirited  remonstrance, 
which  he  put  in  the  mouth  of  Shakespeare.  He 
imagined  our  great  poet  insulted  by  this  invasion  of  his 
domain. 

"  What  though  the  footsteps  of  my  devious  Muse 
The  measured  "walks  of  Grecian  art  refuse, 
Or  though  the  frankness  of  my  hardy  style 
Mock  the  nice  touches  of  the  critic's  file  : 
Yet  what  my  age  and  climate  held  to  view 
Impartial  I  surveyed,  and  fearless  drew. 
And  say,  ye  skilful  in  the  human  heart, 
Who  know  to  prize  a  poet's  noblest  part, 
What  age,  what  clime,  could  e'er  an  ampler  field, 
For  lofty  thought,  for  daring  fancy,  yield  ? 

"  I  saw  this  England  break  the  shameful  bands 
Forged  for  the  souls  of  men  by  sacred  hands  ; 
I  saw  each  groaning  realm  her  aid  implore  ; 
Her  sons  the  heroes  of  each  warlike  shore  : 
Her  naval  standard  (the  dire  Spaniard's  bane) 
Obey'd  through  all  the  circuit  of  the  main. 
Then  too  great  Commerce,  for  a  late  found  world, 
Around  your  coast  her  eager  sails  unfurled  ? 

*  "  Observations,  Anecdotes,  and  Characters  of  Books  and  Men," 
by  the  Rev.  Joseph  Spence. 


A    riONEER    OF   THE    ROMANTIC   MOVEMENT  17 

New  hopes,  new  passions,  thence  the  bosom  fires, 
New  plans,  new  arts,  the  genius  thence  inspires  ; 
Thence  every  scene  which  private  Fortune  knows 
In  stronger  life  with  bolder  spirit,  rose." 

Take  next  Gray,  who  is  sometimes  spoken  of  as  the 
crowning  instance  of  the  artificial  poetry  of  the  eigh- 
teenth century.  How  far  he  was  from  being  a  victim  of 
a  narrow  and  exclusive  taste  in  literature  we  shall  see 
afterward.  He  was  one  of  the  pioneers  of  the  romantic 
movement  ;  he  was  a  minute  observer  and  an  enthusias- 
tic worshipper  of  nature  ;  and  he  carried  his  admiration 
of  artless  poetry  so  far  as  to  find  beauties  even  in 
Lydgate,  whom  few  of  the  admirers  of  early  English 
poetry  have  even  the  patience  to  read.  For  Shakes- 
peare his  enthusiasm  was  unbounded  ;  the  poetry  of  his 
own  age  seemed  poor  and  starved  in  comparison. 
"  But,"  he  says,  in  a  metrical  letter  to  his  illustrator 
Bentley,  in  which  he  sighs  for  the  artist's  grace,  and 
strength,  and  quick  creation : 

"  But  not  to  one  in  this  benighted  age 
Is  that  diviner  inspiration  given 
That  burns  in  Shakespeare's  or  in  Milton's  page, 
The  pomp  and  prodigality  of  heaven." 

Gray  visited  Switzerland  and  Scotland  and  the  Lake 
District  ;  and  wrote  enthusiastic  descriptions  of  the 
scenery  in  letters  to  his  friends.  He  vied  with  Words- 
worth in  the  sincerity  of  his  passion  for  the  Cumberland 
Lakes  ;  with  Scott  in  his  love  for  the  Scottish  High- 
lands. "I  am,"  he  wrote,  "charmed  with  my  expe- 
dition; it  is  of  the  Highlands  I  speak;  the  Lowlands 
are  worth  seeing  once,  but  the  mountains  are  ecstatic, 
and  ought  to  be  visited  in  pilgrimage  once  a  year. 
None  but  these  monstrous  childi'en  of  God  know  how  to 
join  so  much  beauty  with  so  much  horror.  A  fig  for 
your  poets,  painters,  gardeners,  and  clergymen  that 
have  not  been  among  them;  their  imagination  can  be 

2 


18       MEN    OF   LETTERS    IN   THE    EIGHTEENTH    CENTURY 

made  up  of  nothing  but  bowling-greens,  flowering 
shrubs,  horse-ponds,  Fleet  ditches,  shell-grottoes,  and 
Chinese  rails." 

I  might  multiply  quotations  to  show  that  neither 
Shakespeare  nor  Nature  was  undervalued  by  the  poets 
of  the  generation  after  Pope's.  If  their  poetry  was 
limited  in  amount  and  narrow  in  quality,  it  was  not  for 
want  of  a  taste  for  better  things.  Criticism,  in  short,  was 
busy  preparing  the  way  for  the  reception  of  a  new  race 
of  poets  by  augmenting  dissatisfaction  with  the  poetry 
of  the  time,  and  creating  a  taste  for  something  different. 
We  see  this  spirit  two  generations  after  Pope,  even  in 
the  works  of  the  weak  and  amiable  Hayley.  Hayley 
was  not  a  self-satisfied  driveller;  he  was  painfully  con- 
scious of  his  own  weakness,  feeling,  as  he  said  himself  : 

"  Whene'er  I  touch  the  lyre 
My  talents  sink  below  my  proud  desire." 

We  must  not  look  upon  him  as  a  failure  owing  to  the 
benumbing  influence  of  narrow  criticism.  He  repudi- 
ated critical  authority  in  most  valiant  words.  He 
denounced  the  "Classic  Bigot"  and  "  System's  Haughty 
Son  "  as  earnestly  as  the  blindest  disciple  of  the  Lakers  : 

"  Thou  wilt  not  hold  me  arrogant  or  vain, 
If  I  advise  the  young  poetic  train 
To  deem  infallible  no  Critic's  word  ; 
Not  even  the  dictates  of  thy  Attic  Hurd  : 
No  !  not  the  Stagyrite's  unquestioned  page, 
The  Sire  of  critics,  sanctified  by  age  ! 

•  >  >  •  • 

How  oft,  my  Romney,  have  I  known  thy  vein 
Swell  with  indignant  heat  and  gen'rous  pain, 
To  hear,  in  terms  both  arrogant  and  tame, 
Some  reas'ning  Pedant  on  thy  Art  declaim  ; 
Its  laws  and  limits  when  his  sov'reign  taste 
With  firm  precision  has  minutely  traced, 
And  in  the  close  of  a  decisive  speech 
Pronounc'd  some  point  beyond  the  Pencil's  reach, 
How  has  thy  Genius,  by  one  rapid  stroke, 
Refuted  all  the  sapient  things  he  spoke  ' 


hayley's  denunciation  of  the  critics  19 

Thy  Canvas  placing,  in  the  clearest  light, 

His  own  Impossible  before  his  sight  ! 

O  might  the  Bard  who  loves  thy  mental  fire, 

Who  to  thy  fame  attun'd  his  early  lyre, 

Learn  from  thy  Genius,  when  dull  Fops  decide, 

So  to  refute  their  systematic  pride  ! 

Let  him,  at  least,  succeeding  Poets  warn 

To  view  the  Pedant's  lore  with  doubt  or  scorn, 

And  e'en  to  question,  with  a  spirit  free, 

Establish'd  Critics  of  the  first  degree  !  " 

It  was  in  the  revival  of  the  grand  Epic  that  Hayley 
saw  a  possible  future  for  Poetry,  and  Mason  seemed  to 
him  the  destined  hero  of  this  regeneration. 

"  Ill-fated  Poesy  !  as  human  worth, 
Prais'd,  yet  unaided,  often  sinks  to  earth  ; 
So  sink  thy  powers  ;  not  doom'd  alone  to  know 
Scorn,  or  neglect,  from  an  unfeeling  Foe, 
But  destin'd  more  oppressive  wrong  to  feel 
From  the  misguided  Friend's  perplexing  zeal. 

What  !  is  the  Epic  Muse,  that  lofty  Fair, 
Who  makes  the  discipline  of  Earth  her  care  ! 
That  mighty  Minister,  whom  Virtue  leads 
To  train  the  noblest  minds  to  noblest  deeds  ! 
Is  she,  in  office  great,  in  glory  rich, 
Degraded  to  a  poor,  pretended  Witch, 
Who  rais'd  her  spells,  and  all  her  magic  power, 
But  on  the  folly  of  the  favouring  hour  ? 
Whose  dark,  despised  illusions  melt  away 
At  the  clear  dawn  of  Philosophic  day  ?  " 

He  examines  the  received  opinion  that  supernatural 
agency  is  necessary  to  the  Epic,  and  denounces  and 
derides  all  systematic  rules.  A  great  Epic  might  be 
achieved  if  the  subject  were  taken  from  British  history. 

"  By  some  strange  fate,  which  rul'd  each  Poet's  tongue, 
Her  dearest  Worthies  yet  remain  unsung. 
Critics  there  are,  who,  with  a  scornful  smile, 
Reject  the  annals  of  our  martial  Isle, 


20      MEN    OF   LETTERS   IN   THE    EIGHTEENTH    CENTURY 

And,  dead  to  patriot  Passion,  coldly  deem 
They  yield  for  lofty  Song  no  touching  theme. 
What !  can  the  British  heart,  humanely  brave, 
Feel  for  the  Greek  who  lost  his  female  slave  ? 
And  shall  it  not  with  keener  zeal  embrace 
Their  brighter  cause,  who,  born  of  British  race, 
With  the  strong  cement  of  the  blood  they  spilt, 
The  splendid  fane  of  British  Freedom  built? " 

Liberty,  brooding  over  this  neglect,  invites  Mason  to 
undertake  the  task. 

"  Justly  on  thee  th'  inspiring  Goddess  calls  ; 
Her  mighty  task  each  weaker  Bard  appalls  ; 
'Tis  thine,  O  Mason  !  with  unbaffled  skill, 
Each  harder  duty  of  our  Art  to  fill ; 
'Tis  thine  in  robes  of  beauty  to  array, 
And  in  bright  Order's  lucid  blaze  display, 
The  forms  that  Fancy,  to  thy  wishes  kind, 
Stamps  on  the  tablet  of  thy  clearer  mind. 
How  softly  sweet  thy  notes  of  pathos  swell, 
The  tender  accents  of  Elfrida  tell ; 
Caractacus  proclaims,  with  Freedom's  fire, 
How  rich  the  tone  of  thy  sublimer  Lyre  ; 
E'en  in  this  hour,  propitious  to  thy  fame, 
The  rural  Deities  repeat  thy  name  ; 
With  festive  joy  I  hear  the  sylvan  throng 
Hail  the  completion  of  their  favourite  Song." 

I  think  I  have  quoted  enough  to  show  you  that  the 
eighteenth-century  poets  were  not,  on  principle  at  least, 
enamoured  of  trimness  and  primness  in  art,  or  insensi- 
ble to  the  wild  irregular  strength  and  beauty  of  nature. 
They  did  not  of  set  choice  and  with  deliberate  acquies- 
cence confine  themselves  to  a  low  range  of  imagination, 
looking  up  from  their  comfortable  artifical  gardens  with 
supercilious  or  cynical  contempt  on  the  loftier  flights  of 
poetry.  If  the  age  was  comparatively  barren  of  the 
higher  poetry,  the  explanation  is  not  to  be  found  in  the 
predominance  of  narrow  and  exclusive  critical  theories. 


CHAPTER  II 

POPE 

BRIEF  LITERARY  BIOGRAPHY — HIS  POEMS  FALL  INTO  THREE 
PERIODS — ECLOGUES  AND  THE  DISCUSSION  AS  TO  THE  MERITS 
OF  PASTORAL  POETRY — WALSH— CONNECTION  BETWEEN  ENG- 
LISH PASTORALS  AND  ALLAN  RAMSAY  AND  BURNS— POPE  AND 
PHILIPS 

If  you  take  a  cursory  glance  at  the  list  of  Pope's 
works  and  their  subjects,  you  will  see  that  they  fall 
naturally  into  three  divisions  or  periods  :  (1)  The 
poems  by  which  he  acquired  his  reputation,  his  "Pas- 
torals," his  "  Windsor  Forest,"  his  "  Essay  on  Criti- 
cism," his  "Rape  of  the  Lock" — all  written  during  the 
reign  of  Queen  Anne  ;  (2)  his  translations  of  Homer, 
by  which  he  enlarged  his  reputation  and  his  fortune, 
his  principal  occupation  during  the  reign  of  George  I.; 
(3)  the  satirical  and  moral  poems,  with  which  he  crowned 
his  reputation,  and  seriously  compromised  his  character. 
This  is  an  obvious  division,  apparent  on  the  surface  ; 
and  if  you  look  deeper,  you  will  find  that  there  is  more 
justification  for  it  than  there  generally  is.  There  is 
often  a  disadvantage  in  dividing  the  works  of  an  artist 
into  periods  ;  it  is  often  misleading.  You  are  apt  to 
imagine  that  at  each  period  a  complete  transformation 
has  passed  over  the  style  or  the  spirit  of  the  man's 
work ;  that  he  has  become  a  new  creation,  working 
with  entirely  different  aims  and  powers  ;  and  that  the 
work  of  each  period  is  sharply  marked  off  from  that  of 
every  other.  There  is  a  tendency  in  this  way  to  break 
up  and  disperse  the  individuality  of  the  man,  to  confuse 
hi6  identity.     Now,  the  artist  is  himself  in  all  periods  ; 

si 


22  pope 

in  any  period  be  is  more  like  himself  than  like  any  body 
else  ;  any  two  periods  of  his  work  have  more  in  com- 
mon with  each  other  than  they  have  with  any  period 
of  another  man's  work,  supposing  him  to  be  a  great 
artist,  an  artist  of  marked  and  masterful  individuality. 
It  only  happens  that  some  men  at  certain  stages  come 
under  new  influences  from  without,  or  new  impulses 
from  within,  the  effect  of  which  is  distinctly  traceable 
in  their  work,  though  not  to  the  extent  of  blurring 
their  individuality.  This  happens  more  or  less  to  all 
men,  but  it  is  only  when  the  new  influence  becomes  for 
the  time  paramount  that  there  is  any  advantage  in 
separating  the  whole  productions  of  a  man's  lifetime 
into  periods.  When  the  development  has  been  slow 
and  equable,  as  in  the  case  of  Chaucer,  or  Shakespeare, 
or  Graj7",  or  Wordsworth,  or  Tennyson,  when  the 
course  of  the  poet's  activity  has  received  no  violent  and 
sudden  bent  from  new  circumstances  or  new  impulses, 
there  is  no  advantage  in  dividing  his  work  into  periods. 

In  the  case  of  Pope  circumstances  did  interfere 
materially  with  the  direction  of  his  poetic  labors,  and 
two  important  epochs  or  turning-points  can  be  distinctly 
specified.  The  first  was  when  his  early  successes  trans- 
ferred him  from  the  influences  of  his  father's  family  and 
his  home  circle  of  acquaintances  to  the  very  different 
world  of  London  society,  when  boyish  ambitions  and 
enthusiasms  underwent  a  transformation.  If  these 
ambitions  had  been  allowed  free  play,  he  would  not 
have  translated  Homer.  This  was  a  money-making 
enterprise,  instigated  by  the  worldly  spirit  that  then 
passed  into  him  from  new  and  fashionable  acquaintances. 
The  second  epoch  was  when  his  independence  had  been 
secured  by  the  success  of  his  translations,  and  he  was 
free  to  follow  the  guidance  and  stimulation  of  his  friends 
Arbuthnot,  Swift,  and  Bolingbroke,  and  abandoned  his 
powers  to  the  service  of  personal  and  party  strife. 

Pope  was  born  in  the  year  of  the  Revolution,  1688. 


HIS    DESULTORY    EDUCATION  23 

His  father,  who  was  a  London  merchant,  retired  from 
business  in  that  year,  and  went  to  live  at  Binfield  in 
Windsor  Forest.  The  most  influential  fact  in  Pope's 
family  circumstances  was  the  religion  of  his  father,  who 
was  a  Roman  Catholic.  This  probably  influenced  the 
father  in  retiring  from  business  when  the  Catholic  James 
II.  was  driven  from  the  throne  and  the  Protestant 
William  took  his  place.  Farther,  it  influenced  the 
education  of  Pope  in  two  ways.  The  public  schools 
were  closed  to  him,  and  he  received  very  little  regular 
education.  He  was  taught  to  read  by  an  aunt,  the 
widow  of  the  portrait-painter  Cooper,  who  left  him  at 
her  death,  when  he  was  five  years  old,  all  her  "  bookes, 
pictures,  and  medalls  sett  in  gold  or  otherwise."  At  the 
acre  of  eio;ht  he  was  taught  the  rudiments  of  Latin  and 
Greek  by  the  family  priest  ;  then  he  was  sent  for  a  time 
to  a  little  school  atTwyford,  near  Winchestei*,  in  Hamp- 
shire, then  for  a  time  to  another  in  Marylebone,  then  to 
a  third  at  Hyde  Park  Corner  in  London  ;  then  he  read 
for  a  time  under  the  care  of  another  priest  ;  but  at  the 
age  of  twelve  he  was  left  entirely  to  his  own  resources. 
This  desultory  education,  leaving  him  to  read  at  will, 
was  probably  an  advantage  for  a  studious  boy,  who 
could  not  remember  when  he  began  to  make  verses  of 
his  own  invention,  who  compiled  a  play  for  his  school- 
fellows before  he  was  twelve,  and  had  such  a  veneration 
for  poets  and  poetry  that  as  a  small  school-boy  he 
ventured  into  Will's  Coffee-house  that  he  might  have 
the  pleasure  of  seeing  and  hearing  Dryden,  the  greatest 
English  poet  then  living.  These  little  facts  show  how 
precocious  Pope  was  both  in  poetic  sensibility  and  in 
ambition.  When  his  father,  who  was  probably  anxious 
for  his  health,  took  him  from  school  in  London  to  live 
at  home  in  the  Forest,  he  plunged  with  delight  into  a 
miscellaneous  course  of  reading  in  poetry,  and  he  not 
only  read,  but  imitated.  His  school  education  had  been 
too  scrappy  to  make  him  expert  in  construing  foreign 


24  pope 

languages  ;  he  could  barely  construe  Tully's  Offices,  be 
says,  when  be  left  scbool;  but  in  the  course  of  the  pre- 
vious century  all  poets  of  note, — Greek,  Latin,  Italian, 
and  French, — had  been  translated  into  English  verse, 
and  with  the  help  of  these  translations  the  ardent  student 
bad  no  difficulty  in  mastering  the  sense.     "  Mr.  Pope," 
Spence    says,   "  thought   himself     the   better   in    some 
respects  for  not  having  had  a  regular  education.     He 
(as  he  observed  in  particular)  read  originally  for  the 
sense,  whereas  Ave  are  taught  for  so  many  years  to  read 
only    for   words."      Nor,    although    the   boy   was   left 
entirely  free  to  read  what  he  pleased,  was  he  left  alto- 
gether  without   friendly    guidance.     Here,   again,   the 
family  Catholicism  was  serviceable  to  him  ;  it  was  an 
advantage  to  belong  to  a  proscribed  sect.     The  members 
of  such  a  sect  always  hold  much  more  closely  together 
without  distinctions  of  rank  ;  distinctions  of  rank  and 
station  are  levelled  by  their  common  political  disabili- 
ties.    Hence  it  happened  that  Catholic  families  in   the 
neighborhood,   of  good    position    and  literary  culture, 
who  would  probably  not  have  visited  the  retired  linen- 
draper  if  he  had  belonged  to  the  established  religion, 
made  the  acquaintance  of  him  and  of  his  precocious  son, 
and  helped  the  latter  with  encouragement  and  advice  in 
his  reading  and  in   the  first  flights  of  his  genius.     In 
particular,  SirW.  Trumbull,  a  retired  diplomatist,  living 
at  Easthampstead,  within  a  few  miles  of  Binfield,  made 
a  companion  of  the  boy,  and  directed  him  to  the  study 
of    the    French    critics.      Through    another    Catholic 
family,  the  Blounts  of  Mapledurham,  one  of  whom,  Mrs. 
Martha  Blount,  was  his  attached  friend  in  his  last  years, 
Pope  made  the   acquaintance  of  Wycherley  and  Henry 
Cromwell,  and   through  them  of  Walsh  and  Granville, 
all  poets  and  keen  critics  of  literature. 

Thus,  while  Pope's  sensibilities  were  still  fresh,  and  his 
whole  nature  docile  and  pliable,  he  was  guided  into  the 
very  middle  of  the  literary  current  of  his  time,  and  left 


EARLY    EFFORTS  25 

to  paddle  at  his  own  sweet  will  in  backwaters  and  eddies. 
The  eager  and  ambitious  boy  was,  in  fact,  stimulated  to 
the  very  utmost  of  his  powers,  and  directed  to  strive 
with  all  his  energies  after  what  was  then  considered 
literary  excellence  by  the  highest  authorities.  We  can 
see  in  his  early  efforts  traces  of  a  clear-sighted  purpose, 
while  trying  to  do  what  was  then  certain  of  winning 
applause,  to  choose  subjects  that  had  not  been  already 
appropriated  by  great  poets,  and  in  which  success  was 
still  open  to  all  comers.  It  was  then  a  critical  maxim 
that  the  highest  work  of  which  the  human  mind  was 
capable  was  a  great  epic,  and  many  treatises  had  been 
written  in  French  and  in  English,  in  prose  and  in  verse, 
on  the  principles  of  epic  poetry.  Sir  Richard  Black- 
more,  while  Pope  was  at  school,  had  attempted  an  epic 
on  the  subject  of  Arthur.  It  was  a  ponderous  failure. 
Pope  began  an  epic  about  the  age  of  twelve.  The  sub- 
ject was  mythological,  the  hero  being  Alcander,  a  prince 
of  Rhodes.  It  was,  he  told  Spence,  "  about  two  years  in 
hand."  In  later  life  he  considered  that  it  was  better 
planned  than  Blackmore's,  though  equally  slavish  an 
imitation  of  the  ancients  ;  but  he  never  published  it,  and 
it  was  finally  burned  by  the  advice  of  Atterbury.  Even 
in  his  boyhood  Pope  had  judgment  enough  to  understand 
that  his  powers  were  not  yet  sufficiently  mature  for 
original  composition,  and  he  resolved  to  perfect  them  in 
the  first  place  by  imitations  of  his  predecessors.  Walsh 
advised  him  that  there  was  one  praise  yet  open  to  English 
poets,  the  praise  of  correctness.  In  Pope's  boyhood 
the  most  successful  poetical  publication  had  been  Dry- 
den's  translation  of  Virgil.  What  Dryden  had  trans- 
lated, Pope  did  not  presume  to  meddle  with.  Dryden 
was  his  hero,  his  model,  his  great  exemplar.  But  he 
proceeded  to  take  translations  of  classics  by  less  eminent 
poets,  and  try  to  improve  upon  them.  With  this  ambi- 
tion he  translated  the  first  book  of  the  "  Thebaid  "  of 
Statius,  whom  he  considered  the  most  eminent  Latin  epic 


26  pope 

poet  next  to  Virgil,  several  of  Ovid's  "  Heroic  Epistles," 
and  a  considerable  part  of  the  "  Metamorphoses,"  besides 
passages  from  Homer.  It  was  one  of  Pope's  vanities  to 
try  to  give  the  impression  that  his  metrical  skill  was 
even  more  precocious  than  it  was  ;  and  we  cannot  accept 
his  published  versions  of  Statius  and  Ovid  as  evidence  of 
his  proficiency  at  the  age  of  fifteen  or  sixteen,  the  date, 
according  to  his  own  assertion,  of  their  composition, 
though  they  were  not  published  for  several  years  after- 
ward. But  it  is  ascertained  matter  of  fact  that,  by  the 
time  he  was  sixteen,  his  skill  in  verse  was  such  as  to 
astonish  veteran  critics  like  Wycherley  and  Walsh,  and 
that  his  verses  were  handed  about  in  manuscript,  and 
admired  by  men  who  were  then  in  the  foremost  walks 
of  letters. 

Pope  spent  eight  or  nine  years  in  this  arduous  and 
enthusiastic  discipline,  reading,  studying,  experimenting, 
poetry  his  only  business  and  idleness  his  only  pleasure, 
before  any  thing  of  his  appeared  in  print.  In  these  pre- 
liminary studies  he  seems  to  have  guided  himself  by  the 
maxim,  formulated  in  a  letter  to  Walsh,  July  2,  1706, 
that  "it  seems  not  so  much  the  perfection  of  sense  to 
say  things  that  have  never  been  said  before,  as  to  express 
those  best  that  have  been  said  oftenest."  *  His  first  pub- 
lication was  his  "  Pastorals."  Jacob  Tonson,  the  book- 
seller, had  heard  these  pastorals  highly  spoken  of,  and 
he  sent  a  polite  note  to  Pope  asking  that  he  might  have 
them  for  one  of  his  miscellanies.  They  appeared  ac- 
cordingly in  May,  1709,  at  the  end  of  a  volume  con- 
taining contributions  from  Philips,  Sheffield,  Garth, 
and  Rowe.  We  can  see  how  Pope  was  induced  to  make 
his  first  essay  in  pastorals.  Dryden's  translation  of 
Virgil's  "  Eclogues  "  had  drawn  attention  to  this  species 
of  composition.     Walsh  had  written  a  critical  preface  to 

*  "  True  wit  is  Nature  to  advantage  dressed, 

What  oft  was  thought,  but  ne'er  so  well  expressed." 


THE    AIMS    OF   THE    PASTORAL   POET  27 

Dryden's  translation,  in  which  he  laid  down  the  rules 
of  pastoral  poetry,  and  severely  trounced  M.  Fontenelle, 
a  fashionable  French  writer  of  pastorals,  for  his  viola- 
tion of  the  rules. 

This  artificial  species  of  poetry  has  been  almost  uni- 
versally ridiculed  as  tedious  and  insipid  from  the  time 
of  Pope  to  the  present  day.  It  is  not  worth  while  to 
waste  much  time  over  it ;  but  as  it  is  often  condemned 
hastily,  and  in  ignorance  of  what  it  proposed  to  attempt, 
it  is  only  justice  to  Pope,  and  it  may  be  of  some  inter- 
est, to  consider  what  were  the  aims  of  the  pastoral  poet 
as  conceived  by  Pope  and  Walsh.  They  did  not  pre- 
tend to  imitate  any  incidents  in  the  lives  of  actual 
shepherds.  Theocritus  did  this,  and  Allan  Ramsay. 
But  the  shepherds  of  Pope  and  Walsh  were  avowedly 
the  shepherds  of  the  golden  age,  when  the  best  of  men 
were  employed  in  shepherding — men,  as  Walsh  says, 
"  of  learning  and  good  breeding."  These  shepherds 
were  assumed  to  be  men  of  the  most  delicate  and  srentle 
feelings,  living  a  life  of  simplicity  and  calm  tranquillity, 
never  agitated  by  harsh  and  violent  passions.  Any 
tender  feeling  that  ruffled  their  lives  was  softened  and 
subdued  by  the  steady  repose  and  quiet,  placid  beauty 
of  their  surroundings,  and  the  mute  sympathy  of  nature 
with  their  woes.  Realize  the  still  and  tranquil  beauty 
of  this  ancient  pastoral  world,  and  you  will  admit  that  it 
was  a  fine  conception.  The  poets  of  this  world  did  not 
trouble  themselves  to  argue  that  such  a  world  ever 
really  existed  ;  they  admitted  that  it  never  existed  ex- 
cept as  a  beautiful  fiction.  Such  was  the  conception  of 
this  species  of  poetry  held  by  a  school  of  critics  among 
whom  Pope  had  personal  friends.  You  will  find  it 
set  forth  at  length  in  Walsh's  preface  to  Dryden's 
translation  of  Virgil,  in  which  minute  rules  are  deduced 
for  bringing  details  into  harmony  with  this  general 
design.  Now,  this  being  the  aim  of  the  ideal  pastoral, 
to  give  lyric  expression  to  the  jo}Ts  and  the  sorrows,  the 


28  pope 

loves  and  the  griefs,  of  imaginary  beings  in  imaginary- 
circumstances,  I  think  you  will  see  that  many  of  the 
criticisms  passed  on  Pope's  "  Pastorals  "  are  beside  the 
mark.  He  has  been  censured  for  not  doing  what  he 
could  not  have  done  without  being  inconsistent  with 
his  original  design.  Mr.  El  win,  for  example,  Pope's 
truculent  editor,  who  has  examined  every  line  in  Pope 
with  inveterate  hostility,  but  apparently  never  lifted  his 
eyes  from  details  to  consider  Pope's  work  as  a  whole, 
says  :  "  Originality  was  impossible  when  Pope's  only 
notion  of  legitimate  pastoral  was  a  slavish  mimicry  of 
classical  remains.  Had  he  drawn  his  materials  from 
the  English  landscape  before  his  eyes,  from  the  English 
characters  about  his  doors,  and  from  the  English  usages 
and  moods  of  thought  in  his  own  day,  he  would  have 
discovered  a  thousand  particulars  in  which  he  had  not 
been  anticipated  by  Greeks  and  Romans.  He  neg- 
lected this  inexhaustible  territoiy,  and  bestowed  so 
little  attention  upon  the  realities  around  him  that, 
though  his  descriptions  are  confined  to  the  barest 
generalities,  they  are  not  unfrequently  false." 

If  Pope  had  acted  on  this  advice,  no  doubt  he  might 
have  written  a  much  more  generalhr  interesting  poem, 
with  more  of  flesh  and  blood  and  passion  in  it,  but  it 
would  not  have  been  the  kind  of  poem  that  he  intended 
to  write.  Johnson's  criticism  is  more  to  the  point  when 
he  says  that  the  pastoral  form  of  poetry  is  "easy, 
vulgar,  and  therefore  disgusting  ;  whatever  images  it 
can  supply  are  long  ago  exhausted  ;  and  its  inherent 
improbability  always  forces  dissatisfaction  on  the 
mind."  This  is  strong  criticism,  but  perfectly  fair. 
Johnson  was  thinking  more  particularly  of  elegiac 
pastoral  poetry — poems  in  which  poets  lamented  the 
death  of  friends  under  the  fiction  that  they  were 
shepherds  ;  and  he  condemned  this  kind  of  poetry  as  a 
whole,  partly  because  it  gave  an  air  of  affectation  to 
the  poet's  grief,  and  partly  because  there  was  nothing 


Steele's  criticism  op  pastoral  elegies         29 

new  to  be  said.  He  fully  recognized  what  the  poet 
intended  to  do,  but  held  that  it  was  not  worth  doing. 
The  same  criticism  had  been  passed  on  occasional  pas- 
toral elegies  by  Steele  in  the  thirtieth  number  of  the 
Guardian  (April  15,  1713).  Steele  complained  that 
they  were  too  much  on  one  plan  : 

"  I  must,  in  the  first  place,  observe  that  our  country- 
men have  so  good  an  opinion  of  the  ancients,  and  think 
so  modestly  of  themselves,  that  the  generality  of  pas- 
toral writers  have  either  stolen  all  from  the  Greeks  and 
Romans,  or  so  servilely  imitated  their  manners  and 
customs  as  makes  them  very  ridiculous.  In  looking 
over  some  English  pastorals  a  few  days  ago  I  perused 
at  least  fifty  lean  flocks,  and  reckoned  up  an  hundred 
left-handed  ravens,  besides  blasted  oaks,  withering 
meadows,  and  weeping  deities.  Indeed,  most  of  the 
occasional  pastorals  we  have  are  built  upon  one  and  the 
same  plan.  A  shepherd  asks  his  fellow, '  Why  he  is  so 
pale  ?  If  his  favorite  sheep  hath  strayed  ?  If  his  pipe 
be  broken  ?  Or  Phyllis  unkind  ?'  He  answers,  '  None 
of  these  misfortunes  have  befallen  him,  but  one  much 
greater,  for  Damon  (or  sometimes  the  god  Pan)  is  dead.' 
This  immediately  causes  the  other  to  make  complaints, 
and  call  upon  the  lofty  pines  and  silver  streams  to  join 
in  the  lamentation.  While  he  goes  on,  his  friend  inter- 
rupts him,  and  tells  him  that  Damon  lives,  and  shows 
him  a  track  of  light  in  the  skies  to  confirm  it,  then 
invites  him  to  chestnuts  and  cheese.  Upon  this  scheme 
most  of  the  noble  families  in  Great  Britain  have  been 
comforted  ;  nor  can  I  meet  with  any  right  honorable 
shepherd  that  doth  not  die  and  live  again,  after  the 
manner  of  the  aforesaid  Damon." 

There  is  not  room  for  much  variety  in  such  poetry, 
the  personages  of  which  are  simple  people  with  few 
interests  and  few  cares.  Undoubtedly  Milton's 
"  Lycidas,"  apropos  of  which  Johnson  made  his  sweep- 
ing condemnation,  is  an  exception  to  the  general  lame- 


30  pope 

ness  of  these  pastoral  elegies.  The  exquisitely  sweet 
and  rich  music  of  his  verse  would  have  redeemed  the 
most  trite  and  easy  of  conceptions.  But  the  pastoral 
elegy  was  so  common  in  the  years  between  Milton  and 
Johnson  that  the  critic  might  have  been  pardoned  a 
strong  expression  of  his  weariness  of  the  poem,  though 
this  criticism  of  Milton  is  one  of  the  aberrations  of  his 
generally  sound  judgment  of  poetry  and  generally  true 
feeling  for  poetic  excellence.  At  least  he  must  be 
allowed  to  have  confined  his  criticism  to  the  kind  of 
poetry  which  the  author  intended  to  produce.  He  did 
not  censure  him  because  he  had  not  done  what  he  could 
not  have  done  without  deviating  into  another  kind  of 
poetry.  To  have  put  into  the  golden  age  the  manners 
of  country  folk  as  they  were  to  be  seen  near  his  own 
doors  would  not  have  been  an  excellence.  That  the 
imaginary  manners  of  a  fanciful  golden  age  can  never 
possess  deep  human  interest  is  of  course  true  enough, 
and  Pope's  "  Pastorals  "  cannot  claim  a  high  rank  as 
poetry.  Johnson's  criticism  of  them  shows  his  usual 
good-sense  and  sanity.  "To  charge  these  pastorals," 
he  says,  "  with  want  of  invention  is  to  require  what  was 
never  intended.  The  imitations  are  so  ambitiously  fre- 
quent that  the  writer  evidently  means  rather  to  show 
his  literature  than  his  wit.  It  is  surely  sufficient  for  an 
author  of  sixteen  not  only  to  be  able  to  copy  the  poems 
of  antiquity  with  judicious  selection,  but  to  have  ob- 
tained sufficient  power  of  language  and  skill  in  metre 
to  exhibit  a  series  of  versification  which  had  in  English 
poetry  no  precedent,  nor  has  since  had  an  imitation." 

Johnson  remarks  upon  "  the  close  thought "  shown  in 
the  composition  of  the  "  Pastorals  "  :  "  Pope's  '  Pas- 
torals '  are  not,  however,  composed  but  with  close 
thought  ;  they  have  reference  to  the  times  of  the  day, 
the  seasons  of  the  year,  and  the  periods  of  human  life." 
"Windsor  Forest"  is  more  open  than  the  "Four  Pas- 
torals "  to  the  charge  of  incongruously  and  incorrectly 


GREAT  RESULT  OF  THE  CRAZE  FOR  PASTORALS   31 

mixing  up  heathen  deities  with  modern  circumstances, 
archaic  conventional  fancies  with  modern  realities. 
There  is  a  cold  artificiality  about  such  lines  as  these  : 

"  See  Pan  with  flocks,  with  fruits  Pomona  crown'd  ; 
Here  blushing  Flora  paints  th'  enamel'd  ground  ; 
Here  Ceres'  gifts  in  waving  prospect  stand, 
And  nodding  tempt  the  joyful  reaper's  hand." 

Pan  and  Pomona,  and  Flora  and  Ceres,  have  little  life  for 
their  few  English  readers.  Still,  after  discounting  such 
lines,  and  the  extravagant  praise  of  Granville,  and  the 
ludicrous  comparison  of  Queen  Anne  to  Diana,  there 
are  many  beautiful  passages.  Pope's  observation  of 
nature  was  admitted  by  Wordsworth,  and  his  micro- 
scopic fidelity  is  remarked  on  by  M.  Taine.  "Every 
aspect  of  nature,"  says  Taine,  "  was  observed  ;  a  sun- 
rise, a  landscape  reflected  in  the  water,  a  breeze  amid 
the  foliage,  and  so  forth.  Ask  Pope  to  paint  in  verse 
an  eel,  a  perch,  or  a  trout  ;  he  has  the  exact  phrase 
ready  ;  we  might  glean  from  him  the  contents  of  a 
Gradus." 

We  may  remark,  as  illustrating  the  close  connection 
of  one  literary  event  with  another,  and  the  way  in  which 
literary  influences  are  handed  down,  that  the  same  craze 
for  Pastorals  which  produced  Pope's  juvenile  exercises, 
by  one  impulse  after  another,  sending  out  waves  in  all 
directions  as  from  a  centre  of  disturbance  in  a  pool,  gave 
us  the  poetry  of  Burns.  Kindled  by  the  theories  and 
the  practice  of  the  English  wits  and  poets,  Allan  Ramsay 
wrote  real  pastoral  poetry,  exhibiting  the  customs,  the 
dress,  the  games,  the  domestic  sorrows,  the  loves, 
and  the  lives  of  real  shepherds.  And  the  "Gentle 
Shepherd"  awoke  the  genius  of  Burns.  This  great 
result  may  excuse  us  for  dwelling  so  long  on  Pastoral 
poetry  in  the  reign  of  Queen  Anne. 

Pope  professed  to  have  written  both  his  "  Pastorals  " 
and  "Windsor  Forest"  in  1704  or  1705,  at  the  age  of 


32  pope 

sixteen,  only  adding  to  the  latter  the  passage  about  the 
Peace.  Probably  he  had  retouched  them,  as  they  lay  by 
him.  It  was  part  of  his  vanity  to  pretend  to  have  been 
even  more  precocious  than  he  was,  a  foible  that  has  been 
severely  commented  on. 

These  "  Pastorals  "  led  to  one  of  the  first  of  Pope's 
celebrated  literary  quarrels,  which  is  often  referred  to 
as  an  example  of  his  irritable  jealousy  and  subtle  under- 
hand proceedings.  This  has  been  discussed  at  great 
length  and  in  a  spirit  of  bitter  hostility  to  Pope  by  Mr. 
El  win — at  great  length,  and  yet  with  the  omission  of 
important  circumstances,  if  his  object  was  to  prove  that 
Pope  was  the  aggressor. 

In  the  volume  of  Tonson's  Miscellanies  in  1709  in 
which  Pope's  "  Pastorals  "  appeared,  the  first  place  was 
occupied  by  a  set  of  Pastorals  by  Ambrose  Philips, — 
"  Namby  Pamby," — in  every  way  inferior  to  Pope's. 
Four  years  afterward,  on  April  6,  IV 13,  appeared  in  the 
Guardian,  edited  by  Steele,  the  first  of  a  series  of 
papers  on  Pastoral  Poetry — discussing  pastoral  poets 
from  Theocritus  downward,  and  stating  the  principles 
of  the  art.  Really  these  papers  were  a  covert  puff  of 
Philips.  Modern  pastoral  poets  were  ridiculed  for  in- 
troducing Greek  rural  deities,  Greek  flowers  and  fruits 
(hyacinths  and  Psestan  roses),  Greek  names  of  shepherds 
(Damon  and  Thyrsis,  and  so  forth),  Greek  sports  and 
customs  and  religious  rites.  They  ought  to  make  use 
of  English  rural  mythology,  hob-thrushes,  fairies,  gob- 
lins, and  witches  ;  they  should  give  English  names  to 
their  shepherds  ;  they  should  mention  flowers  indige- 
nous to  English  climate  and  soil  ;  and  they  should  intro- 
duce English  proverbial  sayings,  dress,  and  customs. 
All  excellent  principles,  afterward  followed  by  Allan 
Ramsay.  But  the  Guardian  proceeded  to  cite  Philips 
as  an  English  poet  who  had  fulfilled  these  conditions, 
and  consequently  established  for  himself  a  place  side  by 
side  with  Theocritus,  and  Virgil,  and  Spenser,     Philips 


POPE    RETALIATES    ON    STEELE  33 

was  the  eldest  born  of  Spenser.  Pope  was  never  men- 
tioned as  a  pastoral  poet,  though  a  few  lines  were  quoted 
from  one  of  his  imitations  of  Chaucer. 

Now,  Pope  was  bitterly  angry  at  this,  and  he  took 
what  Mr.  Elwin  considers  a  mean  revenge.  He  sent  to 
Steele  a  paper  professing  to  be  a  continuation  of  the 
papers  on  Pastoral  Poetxy,  reviewing  the  poems  of  Mr. 
Pope  by  the  light  of  these  principles.  Ostensibly  Pope 
was  censured  for  breaking  these  rules,  and  Philips  was 
praised  for  observing  them.  It  was  a  most  cutting  piece 
of  irony,  passages  being  cited  from  Philips  where  he 
had  complied  with  all  the  precepts  of  the  Guardian,  and 
yet  had  written  the  most  insipid  commonplace.  Pope 
himself,  though  ostensibly  condemned, was  really  exalted, 
being  described  in  one  place  as  having  "  deviated  into 
downright  poetiy." 

When  the  paper  was  sent  to  him,  Steele,  misled  by 
the  opening  sentences,  was  at  first  unwilling  to  publish 
a  direct  attack  on  Pope,  and  asked  Pope's  leave  to  print 
it,  which  was  graciously  granted. 

Elwin  severely  condemns  this  as  a  mean,  spiteful, 
underhand  trick,  and  declares  that  Pope's  vanity  made 
him  the  aggressor.  I  own  to  having  some  sympathy 
with  the  fun  of  the  thing  ;  but,  apart  from  that,  I  don't 
think  that  Mr.  Elwin  has  made  out  that  Pope  was  the 
aggressor.  In  spite  of  his  labored  argument,  he  has 
omitted  several  cardinal  circumstances,  allowing,  as  is 
his  custom,  a  few  points  to  carry  him  away,  while  he 
does  not  look  at  the  whole. 

The  papers  in  the  Guardian  were  really  a  covert 
attack  on  Pope.  What  were  the  circumstances  ?  Pope's 
"  Windsor  Forest,"  a  pastoral,  appeared  in  the  beginning 
of  March.  It  contained  a  eulogy  of  the  Peace  of  Utrecht, 
the  great  achievement  of  the  Tory  Ministry,  to  which 
Steele  and  Addison  and  the  Whig  coterie  were  far  from 
friendly.  A  few  weeks  afterward  appeared  a  series  of 
papers  on  Pastoral  Poetry,  in  which  Pope  was  studiously 
3 


34  pope 

ignored,  and  a  feeble  poetaster,  his  rival  in  that  kind  of 
poetry,  extravagantly  lauded.  I  should  call  that  mean 
and  underhand,  and  Pope's  method  of  retaliation  strikes 
me  as  simply  highly  ingenious  and  amusing,  and  not 
unfair.  A  magnanimous  man  would  have  passed  by  the 
slight  without  notice  ;  but  if  a  man  did  condescend  to 
notice  it,  as  Pope  did,  his  crime  was  not  of  a  very  black 
dye.     He  only  hoisted  the  enemy  with  their  own  petard. 


CHAPTER  III 
pope — continued 

"ESSAY  ON  CRITICISM" — SUPPOSED  TYRANNY  OF  POPE — ATTI- 
TUDE OP  POPE,  GRAY,  ETC.,  TOWARD  CLASSICAL  TRADITION — 
REVLEW  OF  THEORIES  ACCOUNTING  FOR  THE  POETIC  STERILITY 
OF  THE   EIGHTEENTH   CENTURY 

Our  starting-point  to-day,  the  "  Essay  on  Criticism," 
was  published  in  1711,  midway  between  the  "  Pastorals" 
and  "  Windsor  Forest." 

An  excellent  rule  occurs  at  1.  253  : 

"  Whoever  thinks  a  faultless  piece  to  see, 
Thinks  what  ne'er  was,  nor  is,  nor  e'er  shall  be. 
In  ev'ry  work  regard  the  writer's  end, 
Since  none  can  compass  more  than  they  intend." 

What  was  Pope's  end  ?  He  wrote  the  "  Essay  on 
Criticism "  for  the  entertainment  of  the  cultivated 
people,  men  and  women  of  wit  and  learning  in  his  time, 
who  were  greatly  interested  in  the  art  of  poetry.  It 
belongs  to  the  class  of  poems  called  Didactic,  but  the 
object  of  such  poems  is  not  instruction,  even  when  they 
state  and  illustrate  rules  of  conduct.  The  object  of 
poetry  is  to  give  immediate  pleasure.  When  Virgil 
wrote  his  "  Georgics,"  his  object  was  not  to  lay  down 
practical  rules  for  the  husbandman,  but  to  present  a 
beautiful  picture  of  country  life.  Darwin's  "  Botanic 
Garden  "  was  meant,  not  to  serve  the  same  purpose  as 
lectures  on  botany,  but  to  give  pretty  pictures  of  plants 
and  their  habits.  So  in  Pope's  "Essay  on  Man  "  his 
object  is  not  to  write  an  ethical  or  theological  treatise, 
but  to  give  pointed  and  brilliant  expression  to  certain 


36  pope 

views  of  man's  character,  of  his  position  in  the  universe, 
and  of  his  destiny.  This  might  be  indirectly  instructive, 
by  furnishing  people  with  striking  and  easily  remem- 
bered reflections  as  maxims  of  conduct,  but  the  poet's 
primary  purpose  was  to  charm  and  delight  by  the  novelty 
of  his  expression. 

In  the  "  Essay  on  Criticism "  his  purpose  is  less 
loftj7 — he  did  not  strive  to  lead  his  readers  into  the  same 
lofty  region  of  delightful  emotion.  His  purpose  was 
simply  to  condense,  methodize,  and  give  as  perfect  and 
novel  expression  as  he  could  to  floating  opinions  about 
the  poet's  aims  and  methods,  and  the  critic's  duties  to 

"  What  oft  was  thought,  but  ne'er  so  well  expressed." 

He  was  keenly  interested  in  the  subject  himself,  as  day 
by  day  he  read  and  meditated  on  the  subject  in  his 
quiet  home  at  Binfield  ;  and  so  were  his  acquaintances. 
He  took  for  granted  that  the  town,  the  coffee-houses, 
and  the  drawing-rooms  would  also  be  interested  ;  and  he 
was  not  disappointed.  The  work  excellently  served  its 
primary  purpose  of  giving  pleasure  to  the  town. 

He  expounded  man}'  commonplaces  so  admirably,  so 
perfectly,  so  happity,  that  ever  since  they  have  been 
quoted  in  the  form  he  gave  them,  e.  g.: 

"Fools  rush  in  where  angels  fear  to  tread." — 1.  625. 

"  The  bookful  blockhead,  ignorantly  read, 
With  loads  of  learned  lumber  in  his  head." — 1.  612. 

"  Good-nature  and  good-sense  must  ever  join  ; 
To  err  is  human  ;  to  forgive,  divine."— 1.  525. 

"  True  ease  in  writing  comes  from  art,  not  chance, 
As  those  move  easiest  who  have  learn'd  to  dance." — 1.  362. 

"  Expression  is  the  dress  of  thought." — 1.  318. 

"  Tis  not  a  lip,  or  eye,  we  beauty  call, 
But  the  joint  force  and  full  result  of  all." — 1.  245. 


"essay  on  criticism"  37 

"  A  little  learning  is  a  dang'rous  thing." — 1.  215. 

"  From  vulgar  bounds  with  brave  disorder  part, 
And  snatch  a  grace  beyond  the  reach  of  art." — 1.  152. 

Now,  a  writer  who  makes  expressions  by  means  of  smart 
epigram,  startling  instances,  and  brilliant  illustration  his 
chief  aims,  and  chooses  topics  of  knowledge  and  opinion 
rather  than  feeling,  is  not,  strictly  speaking,  a  poet,  even 
if  he  writes  in  verse.  We  do  not  call  him  a  poet,  but 
a  rhetorician.  We  call  a  man  a  poet  who  touches  our 
feelings  by  means  of  words,  as  a  painter  or  a  sculptor 
does  by  painted  canvas  or  chiselled  stone.  But  rhetori- 
cians in  verse  are  capable  of  giving  us  much  delight  by 
presenting  our  beliefs  in  new  and  unexpected  lights,  and 
this  was  what  Pope  did  in  his  "  Essay  on  Criticism."  We 
do  not  always  find  ourselves  in  agreement  with  the 
opinions  expressed,  but  the  expression  is  always  vivid, 
and  often  most  felicitous. 

Johnson  criticises  Pope's  precept  regarding  the  use  of 
"  representative  metre,"  as  stated  in  the  lines  : 

"  'Tis  not  enough  no  harshness  gives  offence, 
The  sound  should  seem  an  echo  to  the  sense." 

"This  notion,"  says  Johnson,  "has  produced,  in  my 
opinion,  many  wild  conceits  and  imaginary  beauties. 
All  that  can  furnish  this  representation  are  the  sounds 
of  the  words  considered  singly,  and  the  time  in  which 
they  are  pronounced." 

Here  he  makes  the  mistake  of  assuming  that  the 
rhythm  is  determined  solely  by  the  number  of  accented 
and  unaccented  syllables — by  the  pauses  and  the 
syllables  in  and  out  of  accent.  He  quotes  a  passage  in 
which  the  numbers  are  the  same  as  in  Pope's  translation 
of  Homer's  description  of  Sisyphus  rolling  the  stone  up 
the  hill.  In  the  description  of  Sisyphus  the  sound  seems 
adapted  to  the  sense,  and  yet  here  is  another  set  of 
verses  in  the  same  number    which  do  not  convey  the 


38  pope 

same  feeling  of  effort.  Johnson  argues  that  the  reason 
must  be  simply  that  the  subject  is  different ;  the  num- 
bers are  the  same,  but  the  meaning  being  different,  we 
estimate  the  sound  by  the  meaning.  "The  mind  often 
governs  the  ear,  and  the  sounds  are  estimated  by  their 
meaning."  Johnson  forgets  that  the  quantity  of  the 
vowels  and  the  difficulty  of  the  consonants  affect  the 
rhythm. 

If  I  am  to  spend  so  much  time  over  Pope's  early 
poems,  how  am  I  to  cover  in  twenty  lectures  the  poetry 
of  the  four  Georges  ?  I  can,  of  course,  in  such  a  short 
course,  attempt  only  to  give  you  some  idea  of  the  lead- 
ing artistic  aims  of  poetry  in  that  period,  the  poetic 
ideals,  what  the  poets  tried  to  do,  what  we  are  to  look 
for  in  their  poetry,  and  how  they  came  to  have  these 
aims.  And  upon  these  enquiries  we  get  much  light  from 
these  early  poems  of  Pope,  because  they  were  written 
under  the  direct  influence  of  the  arbiters  of  good  taste 
in  writing  in  his  time.  In  the  "Essay  on  Criticism  "  he 
puts  these  standards  of  good  taste  into  brilliant  words, 
and  so  helped  to  perpetuate  their  influence.  But  their 
influence  was  exerted  in  many  forms  that  could  not  be 
put  into  words,  because  the  men  of  the  time  were  not 
conscious  of  them. 

One  of  the  favorite  ways  of  accounting  for  the  bar- 
renness of  the  eighteenth  century  is  to  say  that  the 
poets,  influenced  by  Pope,  were  subject  to  narrow  and 
exclusive  rules  of  criticism,  that  they  were  slavishly 
subservient  to  the  ancients,  writing  only  according  to 
these  precedents,  and  that,  consequently,  their  poetry 
was  dull  and  artificial  and  wanting  in  nature.  I  believe 
this  to  be  a  shallow  theory,  held  in  entire  ignorance  of 
the  great  forces  that  control  and  shape  the  poetry  of 
living  generations  of  men.  Reverence  for  the  ancients, 
more  particularly  for  the  Roman  ancients  Virgil  and 
Horace,  was  undoubtedly  an  influence  in  the  time  of 
Pope  ;  but  it  was  only  a  slight  influence  then,  and  in 


INFLUENCE    OP   THE    ANCIENT   POETS  39 

the  subsequent  generations  of  the  century  it  was  not  an 
influence  at  all. 

Let  us  see  what  exactly  was  meant  by  this  subservience 
to  the  ancients.  At  first  sight  it  would  look  as  if  Pope 
had  no  reverence  for  the  ancients,  but  proposed  to  him- 
self quite  an  independent  standard — namel}',  Nature  : 

"  First  follow  Nature,  and  your  judgment  frame 
By  her  just  standard,  which  is  still  the  same : 
Unerring  Nature  still  divinely  bright, 
One  clear,  unchang'd,  and  universal  light, 
Life,  force,  and  beauty  must  to  all  impart 
At  once  the  source,  and  end,  and  test  of  Art. 
Art  from  that  fund  each  just  supply  provides  ; 
Works  without  show,  and  without  pomp  presides." 

But,  if  we  read  on,  we  come  upon  several  passages 
that  seem  to  betray  a  slavish  admiration  for  the 
ancients  : 

"  You  then  whose  judgment  the  right  course  -would  steer, 
Know  well  each  Ancient's  proper  character  ; 
His  fable,  subject,  scope  in  ev'ry  page ; 
Religion,  country,  genius  of  his  age  ; 
Without  all  these  at  once  before  your  eyes, 
Cavil  you  may,  but  never  criticise. 
Be  Homer's  works  your  study  and  delight, 
Read  them  by  day,  and  meditate  by  night ; 
Thence  form  your  judgment,  thence  your  maxims  bring, 
And  trace  the  muses  upward  to  their  spring. 
Still  with  itself  compar'd,  his  text  peruse, 
And  let  your  comment  be  the  Mantuan  muse. 
When  first  young  Maro  in  his  boundless  mind 
A  work  t'outlast  immortal  Rome  designed, 

•  •  •  •  * 

Nature  and  Homer  were,  he  found,  the  same. 
Convinced,  amaz'd,  he  checks  the  bold  design  ; 
And  rules  as  strict  his  labour'd  work  confine, 
As  if  the  Stagyrite  o'erlook'd  each  line. 
Learn  hence  for  ancient  rules  a  just  esteem  ; 
To  copy  Nature  is  to  copy  them." 


40  POPE 

Again,  in  speaking  of  the  breach  of  these  rules,  he 
declares  : 

"  But  though  the  ancients  thus  their  rules  invade 
(As  kings  dispense  with  laws  themselves  have  made), 
Moderns,  beware  !  or  if  you  must  offend 
Against  the  precept,  ne'er  transgress  its  end  ; 
Let  it  be  seldom,  and  compell'd  by  need  ; 
And  have,  at  least,  their  precedent  to  plead. 
The  critic  else  proceeds  without  remorse, 
Seizes  your  fame,  and  puts  his  laws  in  force." 

The  case  now  seems  very  strong  for  Pope's  subservience 
to  the  ancients.  This  is  strengthened  by  looking  at 
the  general  scope  of  his  works.  He  spent  ten  years  in 
translating  Homer  ;  ten  more  in  professedly  imitating 
Horace. 

But  look  a  little  deeper,  and  you  will  see  that  Pope 
craftily  qualifies  his  subservience  to  the  ancients.  Their 
rules  must  be  observed,  but  then  their  rules  are  very 
vague  and  general;  there  is  much  in  the  poet's  art 
that  they  cannot  teach  ;  and  even  if  they  are  broken, 
success  justifies  the  transgressor  : 

' '  Some  beauties  yet  no  precepts  can  declare, 
For  there's  a  happiness  as  well  as  care. 
Music  resembles  poetry,  in  each  \ 

Are  nameless  graces  which  no  methods  teach,  > 
And  which  a  master-hand  alone  can  reach.        ) 
If  where  the  rules  not  far  enough  extend 
(Since  rules  were  made  but  to  promote  their  end), 
Some  lucky  license  answer  to  the  full 
Th'  intent  propos'd,  that  license  is  a  rule. 
Thus  Pegasus,  a  nearer  way  to  take, 
May  boldly  deviate  from  the  common  track  ; 
From  vulgar  bounds  with  brave  disorder  part, 
And  snatch  a  grace  beyond  the  reach  of  art." 

This  is  surely  a  sufficient  declaration  of  independence. 
/Obey  their  rules  when  it  suits  you. 

But  then  Pope  goes  on  to  allow  this  license  only  to 


A   HIT    AT   MECHANICAL   CRITICS  41 

the  ancients.  "  Moderns,  beware,"  he  says,  and  for  this 
interdict  on  the  moderns  he  is  severely  censured  by  Mr. 
Elwin.  If  Mr.  Elwin  had  had  a  little  more  nimbleness 
of  spirit,  and  consequently  been  able  to  understand  the 
quick  and  subtle  wit  and  sly  humor  of  Pope,  he  might 
have  seen  that  Pope  was  here  laughing  in  his  sleeve  at 
mechanical  critics  : 

"  I  know  there  are,  to  whose  presumptuous  thoughts 
Those  freer  beauties,  ev'n  in  them,  seem  faults, 

»  •  •  ■ 

Most  critics,  fond  of  some  subservient  art, 
Still  make  the  whole  depend  upon  a  part : 
They  talk  of  principles,  but  notions  prize, 
And  all  to  one  lov'd  folly  sacrifice. 

•  •  •  •  • 

Thus  critics  of  less  judgment  than  caprice, 
Curious  not  knowing,  not  exact  but  nice, 
Form  short  ideas  ;  and  offend  in  arts 
(As  most  in  manners)  by  a  love  to  parts." 

Pope,  then,  left  himself  full  liberty  to  depart  from 
the  ancients  when  he  chose — and  he  took  it.  Even  his 
translation  of  Homer  was  a  very  free  translation.  "A 
very  fine  poem,  Mr.  Pope,  but  it  is  not  Homer,"  was 
Bentley's  remark.  His  imitations  of  Horace  are  among 
his  most  original  poems,  according  to  Pattison  ;  and 
every-body  will  agree  that  they  are  most  original. 

Pope's  submission  to  the  ancient  masters  was  not 
slavish  or  subservient.  He  studied  them  as  great  mas- 
ters ought  to  be  studied  when  they  are  not  read  simply 
for  enjoyment.  He  studied  them  with  a  mind  open  to 
receive  impulse  and  suggestion  from  their  example. 

Were  Pope's  eighteenth-century  successors  slavishly 
submissive  to  the  ancients?  Pope  died  in  1744,  when 
there  was  more  than  half  of  the  century  to  run.  I  will 
not  weary  you  with  quotations,  but  I  could  quote  many 
passages  from  Akenside,  Gray,  Churchill,  to  show  that 


42  pope 

Pope's  successors  exalted  Shakespeare,  who  broke  many 
of  Aristotle's  rules, 

"  Above  all  Greek,  above  all  Roman  fame." 

I  have  quoted  already  one  passage  from  Hayley,  late  in 
the  century,  feeblest  of  poets,  to  show  how  little  they 
were  repressed  by  the  rules  of  the  ancients.  Valiant 
protestation  of  contempt  for  rules  is  not  always  a  sign 
of  strength,  but  I  don't  think  it  was  the  rules  of  the 
ancients  that  kept  down  eighteenth-century  poetiy.  A 
mechanical-minded  ecclesiastical  place-hunter — Mason 
— tried  to  write  tragedies  on  the  Greek  model  and  failed. 
Was  it  wit?  An  outrageous  admiration  for  brilliant 
expression,  for  highly  polished  epigram  ?  Well,  even 
Pope  did  not  consider  that  wit  was  every  thing  : 

"  Some  to  conceit  alone  tbeir  taste  confine, 
And  glitt'ring  thoughts  struck  out  at  ev'ry  line  ; 
Pleas'd  with  a  work  where  nothing's  just  or  fit ; 
One  glaring  chaos  and  wild  heap  of  wit. 
Poets,  like  painters,  thus  unskill'd  to  trace 
The  naked  nature  and  the  living  grace, 
With  gold  and  jewels  cover  ev'ry  part, 
And  hide  with  ornaments  their  want  of  art. 

•  •  •  •  • 

Others  for  language  all  their  care  express 

And  value  books,  as  women  men,  for  dress  : 

Their  praise  is  still, — the  style  is  excellent ; 

The  sense  they  humbly  take  upon  content. 

Words  are  like  leaves  ;  and  where  they  most  abound, 

Much  fruit  of  sense  beneath  is  rarely  found." 

And  after  Pope  we  do  not  have  much  wit.  There  is 
nothing  better  than  the  coarse  vigor  of  Churchill  and 
the  ribald  buffoonery  of  Wolcot  (Peter  Pindar). 

I  don't  think  we  can  say  that  the  eighteenth  century 
failed  in  poetry  because  the  energies  of  its  verse-makers 
were  directed  to  rhetorical  brilliancy.  Hayley  and 
Mason  and  Darwin,  the  leading  poets  in  the  boyhood  of 


ALLEGED    MONOTONY    OF    HEROIC    COUPLETS  43 

Wordsworth  and  Coleridge  and  Scott,  were  not  rhetori- 
cally brilliant  ;  their  rhetoric  was  ineffective  ;  they 
were  simply  dull ;  and  we  can  hardly  say  that  they 
failed  as  poets  because  they  tried  to  be  rhetoricians. 
They  would  probably  have  been  dull  in  any  case. 

Another  way  of  accounting  for  the  eighteenth-cen- 
tury barrenness  is  to  ascribe  it  to  the  monotony  of  the 
versification.  Macaulay  speaks  as  if  every  aspiring 
poet  thought  couplets  the  only  permissible  form.  Pope 
used  only  the  couplet,  and,  it  is  often  said,  brought  it 
to  such  mechanical  perfection  that  any  versifier  after 
him  could  turn  out  smooth,  and  finished,  and  melodious 
couplets  with  as  much  ease  as  a  machine  cuts  wood 
into  blocks  of  a  given  size.  Pope  imposed  restrictions 
upon  himself  ;  such  as  that  each  couplet  must  end  with 
a  break  in  the  sense,  that  an  extra  syllable  must  be 
admitted  only  in  one  place,  and  that  the  metrical  pauses 
must  fall  only  in  certain  places.  The  eighteenth-cen- 
tury poets  followed  him  till  the  world  became  weary 
of  heroic  couplets. 

This  theory  also  will  not  bear  examination.  Couplets 
are  not  necessarily  monotonous ;  witness  Chaucer's 
"Knight's  Tale,"  Marlowe's  "Hero  and  Leander," 
Keats's  "  Endymion,"  Swinburne's  "  Tristram  and 
Iseult."  Monotony  in  the  case  of  the  couplet  does  not 
arise  from  the  poet  putting  himself  under  strict  con- 
ditions. We  do  not  find  Pope's  couplets  monotonous, 
if  we  are  interested  in  the  subject.  He  leaves  himself 
room  enough  for  variety  within  his  limits. 

The  poems  of  Hoole,  and  Hayley,  and  Mickle,  and 
Mason,  and  Darwin  are  monotonous  in  rhythm,  not 
because  they  wrote  couplets,  but  because  they  wrote 
bad  couplets,  and  would  have  been  equally  monotonous 
if  they  had  written  in  any  other  stanza.  No  doubt 
writing  in  a  strictly  fettered  rhythm  imposes  a  greater 
strain  upon  the  poet ;  but  if  he  has  power  to  stir  our 
feelings  profoundly,  the  regularity  of  the  rhythm,  keep- 


44  pope 

ing  the  passion  of  his  theme  within  bounds,  gives  him 
a  stronger  hold  upon  us.  If  there  is  no  intense  life  in 
what  he  lias  to  say  to  us,  there  is  of  course  nothing  to 
moderate  ;  and  he  will  not  interest  us  any  the  more 
whatever  gymnastic  feats  he  performs  in  the  way  of 
rhythm,  any  more  than  a  musician  can  hold  us  spell- 
bound by  flourishes  from  top  to  bottom  of  the  scale. 

Besides,  the  eighteenth  century  poets  did  not,  as  a 
matter  of  fact,  enslave  themselves  to  the  couplet  as  the 
only  permissible  form. 

It  was  not  slavish  submission  to  the  ancients,  nor  to 
the  heroic  couplet,  nor  to  the  demand  for  rhetorical 
brilliancy,  that  kept  so  much  of  the  poetry  at  a  low 
level.  We  are  only  scratching  on  the  surface  of  an 
explanation  when  we  adopt  any  such  theory.  Nor  will 
it  do  to  say  that  the  eighteenth-century  was  an  age  of 
prose  ;  that  its  mission  was  to  form  the  prose  style  of 
English  literature.  We  wish  to  know  why  it  was  an 
age  of  prose — why  it  adopted  this  mission.  Nor  will  it 
do  to  say  that  it  held  a  false  theoiy  of  poetic  diction. 
We  wish  to  get  at  the  feeling  that  made  them  satisfied 
with  their  conventional  diction  as  the  right  thing. 

We  must  look  away  from  such  details  if  we  are  to 
understand  the  eighteenth  century,  and  look  at  poetic 
productions  as  wholes.  Take  the  works  of  the  leaders 
of  the  great  poetic  revival  of  this  century — Words- 
worth, Scott,  Byron.  In  what  broad  respects  do  they 
differ  from  all  the  works  of  the  eighteenth  century? 
The  form  of  their  poems,  in  a  large  sense  of  the  word, 
is  new,  and  their  vein  of  feeling  is  new.  They  treat 
new  themes  in  a  new  way,  and  with  a  new  spirit. 
Above  all,  they  give  serious  expression  to  their  own 
personal  emotions.  Consider  the  new  form  of  the  "Lay 
of  the  Last  Minstrel,"  the  first  genuinely  popular  poem, 
interesting  to  all  classes,  between  the  time  of  Queen 
Anne  and  the  nineteenth  century — a  metrical  romance 
regularly   constructed,    with    perfect   unity   of    action, 


DEFECTS    OF    EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY    POETRY  45 

incidents  all  helping  forward  the  progress  of  the  story 
through  various  complications  to  a  denouement.  No 
such  poem  had  ever  been  written  before  ;  it  was  a  new 
form  in  poetry — classical  regularity  of  form,  combined 
with  romantic  freedom  of  incident.  Then  the  spirit  of 
the  poem — the  serious  epic  treatment  of  the  necromanc- 
ing  lady  of  Branksome  Hall,  the  Goblin  page,  the 
wizard,  and  the  bold  moss-trooper.  We  have  nothing 
like  this  in  the  eighteenth  century.  In  Pope's  time  such 
personages  would  either  have  been  burlesqued  or  treated 
with  affected  respect,  such  as  a  grown-up  person  would 
use  toward  fairies  and  hobgoblins  in  telling  stories 
about  them  to  a  child.  Taken  as  a  whole,  in  form  and 
spirit,  the  "  Lay  "  was  a  new  thing  in  literature.  The 
same  maybe  said  of  "Childe  Harold."  Here  also  we 
find  a  new  kind  of  epic,  such  as  the  general  writers  on 
epic  poetry  had  never  contemplated,  the  hero  of  which 
is  not  a  mythical  king  like  Prince  Arthur,  or  a  per- 
sonified virtue  moving  in  Faeryland  like  Spenser's  Red 
Cross  Knight,  or  Guyon,  or  Britomart,  but  a  modern 
man  moving  in  modern  scenes.  Wordsworth  also  is 
new  in  form  as  well  as  in  spirit.  No  poet  before  him 
had  dared  to  shut  himself  up  in  the  country  and  choose, 
as  the  subject  of  his  verse,  his  own  personal  emotions  and 
reflections  as  aroused  by  the  moving  spectacle  of  sky 
and  mountain  and  glen,  and  the  homely  life  of  ordinary 
rustics.  He  wrote  a  kind  of  pastoral  poetry  that  had 
not  been  legislated  for  by  the  technical  lawgivers  of 
the  art. 

The  serious  expression  in  new  forms  of  intense  and 
generous  personal  emotion  is  a  broad  characteristic  of 
the  nineteenth-century  revival.  Now  we  can  under- 
stand why  the  poets  of  the  eighteenth  century  failed  in 
the  artistic  expression  of  serious  and  generous  feeling. 
The  main  defects  of  their  poetry  can  be  traced  to  one 
source — the  character  of  the  audience  for  whose  judg- 
ment they  had  respect,  by  whose  ideals  they  were  con- 


46  pope 

trolled,  who  were  to  them  the  arbiters  of  taste.  The 
standard  of  taste  in  the  time  of  Queen  Anne,  and  till 
near  the  end  of  the  century,  was  a  self-consciousty  aris- 
tocratic and  refined  society,  self-conscious  of  their 
superior  manners  and  superior  culture,  and  disposed  to 
treat  the  ways  of  the  vulgar  with  amused  contempt. 
This,  I  think,  can  be  shown  to  be  at  the  root  of  the  striv- 
ing after  wit  and  the  respect  for  established  models, 
and  the  false  theory  of  poetic  diction  in  serious  poetry. 
Fear  of  being  vulgar,  fear  of  being  singular — these 
were  the  real  nightmares  that  sat  upon  eighteenth- 
century  poetry. 


CHAPTER  IV 
pope — continued 

INFLUENCE  OF  IDEAS  ON    POETRY — SPIRIT  OF    THE  AGE — INFLU- 
ENCE OF   SOCIETY  ON  POPE — GAY'S  BALLADS 

I  am  not  sure  that  you  all  followed  what  I  said  in  my 
last  lecture  about  the  influences  that  formed  the  poetic 
ideals  of  the  eighteenth  century.  By  the  poetic  ideals 
of  a  generation  I  mean  the  ideas  prevalent  among  those 
interested  in  poetry  as  to  what  poetry  should  be — the 
sentiments  that  they  wish  to  find  in  poetry,  the  intel- 
lectual, or  moral,  or  emotional  cravings  for  which  they 
seek  satisfaction  in  poetry.  But,  you  may  ask,  How 
can  this  be  said  to  make  poetry  ?  Is  it  not  the  poet  who 
makes  the  poetry  ?  Yes  ;  but  he  makes  it  in  harmony 
with — or,  if  he  is  a  defiant  man,  in  antagonism  to — the 
poetic  ideals  of  the  men  with  whom  he  mixes  and  for 
whom  he  writes.  You  have  heard  of  the  spirit  of  the 
age — an  intangible  something  that  sets  its  mark  upon 
all  the  works  of  a  generation  of  men  :  their  books,  their 
architecture,  their  dress,  their  commercial  enterprises, 
their  institutions.  What  I  mean  by  the  poetic  ideal  is 
the  working  of  this  spirit  upon  poetry.  I  am  inclined 
to  think  myself  that  people  sometimes  speak  of  this 
spirit  of  the  age  in  too  unqualified  terms,  as  if  every 
thing  came  under  its  influence.  Now,  many  things 
escape  its  influence,  as  you  recognize  when  you  speak 
of  things  or  persons  being  behind  the  age  ;  it  is  only 
the  most  distinctive  products  of  the  age  that  feel  its 
shaping,  its  generative  force.  And  besides,  there  may 
be  more  than  one  spirit  in  a  generation,  each  with  its 
own  range  of  influence,  handed  down,  it  may  be,  from 

47 


48  POPE 

past  times,  and  kept  alive  by  sympathy  with  them,  or 
engendered  by  the  peculiar  circumstances  of  the  circle 
of  people  whom  it  pervades.  Go  into  churches  of 
widely  different  sects,  for  example,  and  3-011  seem  to 
breathe  different  atmospheres — a  different  spirit  per- 
vades them  ;  the  "  full  force  and  joint  result  "  of  orna- 
ment and  ritual  and  sermon  is  somehow  different.  You 
might  find  it  hard,  if  you  fixed  on  details,  to  say  where 
the  difference  lies  ;  the  same  sermon  that  is  preached  in 
one  might  have  been  preached  in  the  other  ;  the  same 
hymns  might  have  been  sung  ;  yet  we  feel  under  the 
influence  of  a  different  spirit.  And  further,  these  various 
churches  have  probably  less  in  common  with  each  other, 
though  they  mix  in  the  same  age,  than  they  have  with 
the  churches  of  past  ages,  each  of  them  perpetuating  a 
traditional  spirit  of  its  own,  and  perhaps  making  it  a 
point  of  honor  to  keep  that  unchanged. 

The  same  holds  in  poetry.  A  poet  writes  under  the 
influence  of  a  certain  spirit,  a  certain  social  medium, 
which  shapes  and  colors  what  he  writes.  To  discover 
this  we  must  look  not  only  at  the  general  character 
of  his  age,  but  also  at  the  character  of  his  immediate 
audience,  of  the  circle  in  which  he  moves.  We  must 
study  his  relations  with  them,  whether  they  are  rela- 
tions of  harmony,  as  in  the  case  of  Pope,  or  relations  of 
antagonism,  as  in  the  case  of  Byron.  And  we  can't 
expect  to  get  at  this  subtle  spirit  by  studying  isolated 
details,  and  arguing  about  them.  My  object  in  last 
lecture  was  to  impress  this  fact  upon  you  in  the  case  of 
eighteenth-century  poetry.  There  is  a  something  in  the 
spirit  of  eighteenth-century  poetry  which  the  critics  of 
this  century,  broadly  speaking,  do  not  like.  They  com- 
plain that  the  eighteenth  century  is  barren  of  true 
poetry.  And  they  often  set  to  work  to  account  for 
this  by  fastening  on  details  of  form,  and  diction,  and 
imagery,  and  metre.  Some  say  the  barrenness  is  due  to 
subservience  to  ancient  rules,  others  to  an  exclusive  am- 


INFLUENCE    OF    SOCIETY    ON    POETRY  49 

bition  after  witty  expression,  others  to  a  slavish  attach- 
ment to  one  kind  of  metre. 

Now,  in  the  first  place,  I  think  they  exaggerate  the 
barrenness  of  the  century.  It  is  often  spoken  of  as  if 
there  were  no  good  poetiy  then,  whereas  it  was  only  com- 
paratively deficient  in  certain  kinds.  And,  in  the  second 
place,  we  do  not  satisfactorily  account  for  the  deficiency 
in  certain  kinds  if  we  look  at  details  by  themselves.  We 
must  look  at  them  in  connection  with  the  spirit  of  the 
society  for  which  Pope  wrote.  The  spirit  of  this  society 
accounts  not  only  for  much  that  was  in  Pope's  poetry, 
but  also  for  much  that  was  in  the  two  following  genera- 
tions, because  the  traditions  of  this  society  were  main- 
tained after  Pope's  time,  its  spirit  was  transmitted  as 
the  dominant  spirit  in  literature  till  the  end  of  the  cen- 
tury. There  were  revolts  against  it  in  the  poetry  of 
Thomson  and  Dyer,  and  Gray  and  Collins,  and  Burns 
and  Cowper,  but,  on  the  whole,  it  maintained  its  hold. 
Its  supremacy  was  not,  indeed,  shaken  till  Wordsworth 
and  Byron  raised  the  standard  of  rebellion,  and  the 
majority  at  once  in  fact,  and  gradually  in  open  avowal, 
went  over  to  them. 

The  society  that  imposed  the  laws  of  taste  in  poetry 
in  Pope's  time  was,  as  I  said,  an  aristocratic  society, 
self-consciously  so,  as  it  could  hardly  fail  to  be  when 
high  and  low,  rich  and  poor,  were  marked  off  from  each 
other  by  such  conspicuous  differences  of  dress  and 
manners  as  they  moved  about  in  their  daily  life.  It 
was  not  only  self-consciously  but  superciliously  aristo- 
cratic. Sympathy  with  the  simple  feelings  of  unfashion- 
able folk  was  rare  in  those  days.  Now,  in  such  a  society 
one  ruling  motive — except,  of  course,  among  persons  of 
natural  hardihood  or  assured  position  in  it — is  fear  of 
vulgarity,  resulting  in  a  disposition  to  treat  as  vulgar 
whatever  is  done  by  people  outside  the  pale  of  fashion. 
Many  details  might  be  urged  against  this  view,  but  I  think 
it  must  be  allowed  that  this  is  a  very  prevalent  motive, 


50  pope 

Let  us  see,  then,  how  this  prevalent  motive  would 
operate  on  poetry,  supposing  the  poet  to  be  under  its 
influence.  It  would  affect  both  his  choice  of  subjects 
and  his  manner  of  treating  them.  Nature,  Pope  said, 
is  "  at  once  the  source  and  test  of  art."  But  Nature  is 
a  vague  term,  which  each  person  interprets  as  meaning 
his  own  nature,  and  that  must  always  be  interpenetrated 
by  the  spirit  of  a  man's  social  surroundings,  the  spirit 
prevalent  among  his  companions.  The  Nature  from 
which  Pope  chose  his  themes  was  either  human  nature 
as  he  saw  it  in  fashionable  society,  or  human  nature  so 
treated  as  not  to  offend  their  susceptibilities.  Pope's 
conception  of  Nature  did  not  lead  him  to  go,  like 
Wordsworth,  to  simple  country-people  for  his  subjects, 
and  for  his  diction  to  "the  natural  language  of  man 
in  a  state  of  intense  emotion."  "  True  wit,"  he  said, — 
by  wit  meaning  poetic  expression, — is  "Nature  to 
advantage  dressed."  This  casual  metaphor  in  the 
"  Essay  on  Criticism "  takes  us  nearer  to  the  centre 
of  Pope's  ideal  of  poetic  expression,  which  was  also 
the  ideal  of  his  age,  than  any  other  single  passage  in 
his  writings. 

Let  us  take  an  example  of  what  a  refined  contemporary 
of  his,  writing  in  the  Guardian  about  Philips's 
"Pastorals,"  considered  the  dressing  of  Nature  to 
advantage: 

"  I  will  yet  add  another  mark,  which  may  be  observed 
very  often  in  the  above-named  poets,  which  is  agreeable 
to  the  character  of  shepherds,  and  nearly  allied  to  super- 
stition: I  mean  the  use  of  proverbial  sayings.  I  take 
the  common  similitudes  in  pastoral  to  be  of  the  pro- 
verbial order,  which  are  so  frequent  that  it  is  needless 
and  would  be  tiresome  to  quote  them.  I  shall  only 
take  notice  upon  this  head,  that  it  is  a  nice  piece  of  art 
to  raise  a  proverb  above  the  vulgar  style,  and  still  keep 
it  easy  and  unaffected.  Thus  the  old  wish,  '  God  rest 
his  soul,'  is  finely  turned  : 


POETICAL    BATHOS  51 

"  'Then  gentle  Sidney  liv'd,  the  shepherd's  friend, 
Eternal  blessings  on  his  shade  attend.'  " 

So  easy  a  metamorphosis  as  this  Pope  would  have 
despised,  for  the  poetic  dress  of  nature  is  esteemed 
according  to  the  poet's  originality  and  ingenuity  in  con- 
structing it.  Pope,  on  the  contrary,  would  have  required 
such  an  expression  as  only  a  man  of  genius  could  devise 
after  much  toil.  In  a  "  Treatise  on  the  Art  of  Sinking 
in  Poetry," — one  of  the  miscellanies  published  conjointly 
by  Pope,  Swift,  and  Arbuthnot, — you  will  find  that  Pope 
ridicules  simple  expressions  and  the  raising  of  language 
above  the  vulgar  style,  enforcing  his  opinion  by  speci- 
mens of  bathos  culled  from  the  poets  of  the  time  ;  e.g. : 
"Who  knocks  at  the  door?"  becomes  when  raised 
above  the  vulgar : 

"  For  whom  thus  rudely  pleads  my  loud-tongued  gate, 
That  he  may  enter  ?  " 

or   Theobald's  elevation  of  "Open  the  letter"  into  the 
sounding  line,  "  Wax  !    render  up  thy  trust." 

If  you  look  at  Pope's  poetry  closely,  you  find  that 
though  he  avoided  easy  elevations  he  did  think  it  neces- 
sary to  use  language  which  now  seems  affected  and 
insincere.  In  this  you  see  him  influenced  by  the  spirit 
of  his  age.  In  his  "  Messiah,"  published  in  the  Spec- 
tator (May  14,  1712),  and  considered  by  critics  of  the 
time  to  be  a  very  fine  poem  and  an  improvement  on 
Isaiah,  whose  prophecy  we  think  grand  in  its  simplicity, 
Ave  clearly  see  this  influence  at  work.  For  example,  in 
Isaiah  (xli.  19)  we  have  :  "  I  will  set  in  the  desert  the  fir- 
tree,  and  the  pine,  and  the  box-tree  together,"  while- 
Pope  describes  the  change  as  follows  : 

"  Waste,  sandy  valleys,  once  perplex'd  with  thorn, 
The  spicy  fir  and  shapely  box  adorn." 

For  Isaiah's  phrase  "  the  suckling  child  "  Pope  has  got 
"  the  smiling  infant,"  and   the   Avhole   poem  is  full   of 


52  POrE 


si 


imilar  examples.  So,  too,  we  find  many  examples  of 
bad  taste  in  his  translation  of  Homer,  for  Pope  con- 
sidered it  necessary  through  the  whole  of  that  work  to 
dress  Homer  to  advantage  for  the  fashionable  society  of 
Queen  Anne's  time. 

That  society  would  have  ridiculed  Achilles  weeping 
by  the  side  of  Thetis,  and  accordingly  Pope  "  elevates  " 
the  passage  thus : 

"  Far  in  the  deep  recesses  of  the  main, 
Where  aged  Ocean  holds  bis  watery  reign, 
The  goddess-mother  heard.     The  waves  divide  ; 
And,  like  a  mist,  she  rose  above  the  tide  : 
Beheld  him  mourning  on  the  naked  shores  ; 
And  thus  the  sorrows  of  his  soul  explores." 

Pope  has  not  rendered  the  touching  simplicity  which 
Homer  achieves  without  infringing,  to  our  modern 
ideas,  on  the  dignity  of  his  heroic  characters.  In  the 
case  of  minor  poets  of  the  time  this  elevation  of  diction 
is  not  always  achieved  with  the  same  taste  that  Pope — 
master  of  language — showed.  In  the  translation  of  the 
"  Odyssey,"  in  which  Pope  was  assisted  by  two  coadju- 
tors, the  magnifying  of  the  incidents  is  less  skilfully 
managed  and  the  affectation  becomes  more  apparent. 
We  may  cite  for  this  purpose  that  passage  in  the  sixth 
book  of  the  "  Odyssey "  where  Odysseus  discovers 
Nausicaa  and  her  maidens  at  the  stream.  The  affec- 
tation in  the  poetical  translation  is  apparent  when  we 
compare  it  with  the  prose  version  by  Butcher  and  Lang  : 
"  Then  they  took  the  garments  from  the  wain  in  their 
hands,  and  bore  them  to  the  black  water,  and  briskly 
trod  them  down'  in  the  trenches,  in  busy  rivalry.  Now 
when  they  had  washed  and  cleansed  all  the  stains,  they 
spread  all  out  in  order  along  the  shore  of  the  deep,  even 
where  the  sea,  in  beating  on  the  coast,  washed  the 
pebbles  clean.  Then,  having  bathed,  and  anointed  them 
well  with  olive  oil,  they  took  their  mid-day  meal  on  the 


PROSE   AND   POETICAL   TRANSLATIONS    COMPARED      53 

river's  banks,  waiting  till  the  clothes  should  dry  in  the 
brightness  of  the  sun.  Anon,  when  they  were  satisfied 
with  food,  the  maidens  and  the  princess,  they  fell  to 
playing  at  ball,  casting  away  their  tires,  and  among 
them  Nausicaa  of  the  white  arms  began  the  song." 
Very  different  this  from  the  grandiloquent  version  b}r 
Brome,  which  Pope  approved  by  using  it  as  his  own  : 

"  Then  emulous,  the  royal  robes  they  lave, 
And  plunge  the  vestures  in  the  cleansing  wave 
(The  vestures  cleans'd,  o'erspread  the  shelly  sand. 
Their  snowy  lustre  whitens  all  the  strand  !) 
Then  with  a  short  repast  relieve  their  toil, 
And  o'er  their  limbs  diffuse  ambrosial  oil  ; 
And  while  the  robes  imbibe  the  solar  ray, 
O'er  the  green  mead  the  sporting  virgins  play 
(Their  shining  veils  unbound).     Along  the  skies, 
Toss'd,  and  retoss'd,  the  ball  incessant  flies, 
They  sport,  they  feast ;  Nausicaa  lifts  her  voice, 
And,  warbling  sweet,  makes  earth  and  heaven  rejoice." 

With  the  primitive  enjo}Tment  described  by  Homer 
the  poet  did  not  evidently  sympathize.  The  character 
either  of  the  poet  or  of  his  audience  was  at  fault  : 
either  the  poet  was  insensible  to  the  charms  of  such 
passages,  or  his  audience  would  have  considered  them 
coarse.  When  the  Queen  Anne  poets  wrote  for  the 
stage, — which  must  appeal  to  the  sympathies  of  a  wide 
circle, — and  not  for  fashionable  society,  you  find  that 
the  art  of  simple  writing  was  not  lost.  Half  consciously 
the  poets  wrote  differently  for  different  audiences. 
True,  Addison's  "  Cato  "  is  a  splendid  example  of  the 
stilted  style  of  the  period,  but  there  are  here  and  there 
decided  exceptions. 

Gay's  songs,  in  plays  addressed,  as  plays  must  be  to 
succeed,  to  a  wider  circle  than  the  fashionable  society 
of  the  time,  show  that  the  art  of  simple  writing  was  not 
lost,     In  "  'Twas  when  the  seas  were  roaring  "  (from 


54  POPE 

"What   d'ye    Call   It,"    1715),    and    in    "Black-eyed 
Susan,"  occur  such  lines  as  these  : 

"  Cease,  cease,  thou  cruel  ocean, 
And  let  my  lover  rest. 
Ah,  what's  thy  troubled  motion, 
To  that  within  my  breast  ?  " 

"  So  the  sweet  lark,  high  poised  in  air, 
Shuts  close  his  pinions  to  his  breast 
(If  chance  his  mate's  shrill  cry  he  hear), 
And  drops  at  once  into  her  nest." 

Gay  had  more  of  a  gift  for  simple,  fluent,  easy,  melo- 
dious song  than  any  of  his  contemporaries.  Yet,  even 
in  these,  there  is  a  touch  of  burlesque,  an  accent  of 
insincerity,  in  the  poet's  assumed  sympathy  with  the 
simple  feelings  of  simple  folk.  In  his  "  Pastorals " 
Gay  made  broad  fun  out  of  the  superstitious  igno- 
rance and  coarse  sentiments  of  rustics  :  he  had  no 
eye,  as  Wordsworth  had,  for  the  higher  modes  of  feel- 
ing ;  he  saw  only  the  rude  defects  incident  to  the  hard- 
ness and  narrowness  of  their  lives,  and  these  amused 
him.  They  amused  fashionable  people,  and  Gay,  a  fat, 
good-natured,  simple-hearted  man,  petted  and  caressed 
and  pensioned  by  great  people  all  through  his  literary 
life,  quite  fell  in  with  their  humor. 

There  is  one  kind  of  poetry,  mock-heroic  or  heroic- 
comical,  for  which  the  elevated  Queen  Anne  style  is 
peculiarly  suited — in  which  its  affectation  and  insin- 
cerity are  not  felt  as  faults,  because  affectation  and 
insincerity  are  part  of  the  humor  in  which  the  poet 
writes.  Pope's  poetic  diction  is  seen  in  one  of  its 
happiest  applications  in  the  "  Rape  of  the  Lock,"  where 
trivial  incidents,  and  little  anxieties  and  interests,  and 
pretty  frivolities  are  purposely  treated  as  matters  of 
vast  moment.  Here,  also,  he  found  a  theme  well  within 
the  interests  of  his  audience.     I  presume  that  you  have 


m.  taine's  criticism  of  pope  55 

all  read  this  charming  poem,  and  have  learned  from 
your  edition  of  it  how  it  originated  in  a  young  lord's 
cutting  off  a  lock  of  a  lady's  hair  ;  how  this  led  to  a 
coolness  between  the  two  families  ;  how  Pope  was 
asked  to  write  a  poem  on  the  subject  to  smooth  over 
the  quarrel  ;  how  the  poem  appeared  in  1712,  and  was 
expanded  before  1714  to  the  form  in  which  we  have  it. 
It  is  a  different  sort  of  theme  from  the  technical  essays, 
and  the  translations  and  imitations  of  Virgil  and  Ovid 
and  Chaucer,  in  which  Pope  had  hitherto  exerted  him- 
self— a  thenie  directly  suggested  by  the  fashionable  life 
of  the  time,  by  human  nature  as  it  lived  and  moved  in 
the  society  of  Queen  Anne's  days.  Pope  had  a  model 
in  Boileau's  "  Lutrin,"  a  model  as  regarded  the  form, 
but  the  subject  was  fresh  and  new  ;  it  came  to  him  from 
breathing  life,  and  was  not  laboriously  sought. 

Pope  has  been  charged  with  gross  impoliteness  in 
writing  such  a  poem  ;  indeed,  M.  Taine  found  in  it  a 
coarseness  akin  to  Swift's.  "Pope,"  wrote  M.  Taine, 
"  dedicates  his  poem  to  Mrs.  Arabella  Fermor  with 
every  kind  of  compliment.  The  truth  is  he  is  not 
polite  ;  a  Frenchwoman  would  have  sent  him  back  his 
book,  and  advised  him  to  learn  manners  ;  for  one  com- 
mendation of  her  beauty  she  would  find  ten  sarcasms 
upon  her  frivolity.  .  .  In  England  it  was  not  found 
too  rude.  Mrs.  Arabella  Fermor  was  so  pleased  with 
the  poem  that  she  gave  away  copies  of  it.  .  .  But 
the  strangest  thing  is  that  this  trifling  is,  for  Frenchmen 
at  least,  no  badinage  at  all.  It  is  not  at  all  like  light- 
ness or  gayety.  Dorat,  Gresset,  would  have  been  stupe- 
fied and  shocked  by  it.  We  remain  cold  under  its  most 
brilliant  hits.  Now  and  then  at  most  a  crack  of  the 
whip  arouses  us,  but  not  to  laughter.  These  caricatures 
seem  strange  to  us,  but  do  not  amuse.  The  wit  is  no 
wit  :  all  is  calculated,  combined,  artificially  prepared  ; 
we  expect  flashes  of  lightning,  but  at  the  last  moment 
they  do   not  descend.    .    .     We  say  to   ourselves   now 


56  pope 

that  we  are  in  China  :  that  so  far  from  Paris  and  Vol- 
taire we  must  be  surprised  at  nothing  ;  that  these  folks 
have  ears  different  from  ours  ;  and  that  a  Pekin  manda- 
rin vastly  relishes  kettle-music.  Finally,  we  compre- 
hend that,  even  in  this  correct  age  and  this  artificial 
poetry,  the  old  style  of  imagination  exists  ;  that  it  is 
nourished,  as  before,  by  oddities  and  contrasts  ;  and 
that  taste,  in  spite  of  all  culture,  will  never  become 
acclimatized  ;  that  incongruities,  far  from  shocking, 
delight  it  ;  that  it  is  insensible  to  French  sweetness  and 
refinements  ;  that  it  needs  a  succession  of  expressive 
figures,  unexpected  and  grinning,  to  pass  before  it  ;  that 
it  prefers  this  coarse  carnival  to  delicate  insinuations  ; 
that  Pope  belongs  to  his  country,  in  spite  of  his  classical 
polish  and  his  studied  elegancies ;  and  that  his  unpleas- 
ant and  vigorous  fancy  is  akin  to  that  of  Swift." 

This  poem,  which  English  critics  of  all  schools  agree 
in  praising  as  a  masterpiece  of  light,  airy,  gay  extrava- 
gance,— marum  sal,  as  Addison  called  it, — strikes  M. 
Taine  as  a  piece  of  harsh,  scornful,  indelicate  buffoonery. 
For  him  it  is  a  mere  succession  of  oddities  and  contrasts, 
of  expressive  figures,  unexpected  and  grinning — an 
example  of  English  insensibility  to  French  sweetness 
and  refinement.  What  especially  offends  his  delicate 
sense  is  the  bearishness  of  Pope's  laughter  at  an  elegant 
and  beautiful  woman  of  fashion.  Pope  describes  with 
a  grin  on  his  face  all  the  particulars  of  the  elaborate 
toilet  with  which  Belinda  prepared  her  beauty  for  con- 
quest, and  all  the  artificial  airs  and  graces  with  which 
she  sought  to  bewitch  the  heart  of  susceptible  man. 
The  Frenchman  listens  without  sympathy,  without  ap- 
preciation, with  the  contemptuous  wonder  of  a  well- 
bred  man  at  clownish  buffoonery.  He  sees  nothing  to 
laugh  at  in  a  woman  spending  three  hours  over  her 
toilet.  Is  she  not  preparing  a  beautiful  picture  for  him  ? 
She  cannot  do  this  without  powders  and  washes  and 
paint-pots.     What  is  there  to  laugh  at  in  this  ?     It  is  a 


M.  taine's  criticism  of  pope  57 

mere  matter  of  fact.  The  entire  surrender  of  the  female 
heart  to  little  artifices  for  little  ends  does  not  strike  him 
as  ludicrous.  His  delight  in  the  finished  picture,  the 
elegant,  graceful,  captivating  woman,  hallows  every 
ingredient  used  in  the  making  of  it.  It  is  not  polite  to 
laugh  at  a  woman. 


CHAPTER  V 

A   GROUP    OF   EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY    POETS 

THOMSON — EARLY  LIFE — DESCRIPTIVE  POETRY  GENERALLY — 
'  WINTER  "—THOMSON'S  POSITION  IN  POETRY — DYER  AND 
SOMERVILLE 

Between  the  end  of  Pope's  second  period  and  the 
beginning  of  his  third  a  new  poet  appeared,  of  a  very 
different  vein. 

It  was  in  the  last  year  of  the  reign  of  George  I.  that 
this  fresh  and  powerful  voice  made  itself  heard  in 
literature.  A  respectable  clergyman  of  literary  tastes, 
Mr.  Whatley,  chanced  to  take  up  a  volume  of  poems 
lying  on  the  counter  of  Millan  the  publisher.  The 
poems  had  been  published  for  some  weeks,  but  had 
attracted  no  attention.  As  he  turned  over  the  leaves 
Mr.  Whatley's  attention  was  roused  ;  before  he  laid  the 
book  down  attention  had  developed  into  enthusiasm,  and 
he  rushed  off  to  the  coffee-houses  to  proclaim  the  dis- 
covery of  a  new  poet. 

The  new  poet  was  James  Thomson,  a  young  man  of 
twenty-six,  just  as  old  as  the  century,  who  had  been 
born  and  bred  in  very  different  circumstances  from 
Pope,  and  whose  poetry  consequently  derived  its  tone 
from  very  different  influences.  Consider  the  life  of 
Thomson  up  to  the  time  when  "  Winter,"  the  first  of  his 
poems  on  the  "  Seasons,"  was  published  in  1 726,  and  you 
will  see  that  a  very  different  strain  was  to  be  expected 
from  him.  His  father  was  a  minister  in  the  Scotch  Low- 
lands— minister  of  the  parish  of  Southdean  in  Rox- 
burghshire. The  extraordinary  death  of  this  gentleman, 
when  his  son  was  in  his  eighteenth  year,  is  significant 

58 


Thomson's  early  years  59 

both  of  the  superstitious  atmosphere  in  which  the  poet 
was  educated,  and  of  the  sensitiveness  of  the  organiza- 
tion that  he  inherited.  There  was  a  ghost  in  the  parish 
of  Southdean,  and  the  minister  was  sent  for  to  lay  it  ; 
but  no  sooner  had  he  begun  his  exorcism  than  it  seemed 
to  him  that  he  was  struck  on  the  head  with  a  ball  of  fire, 
and  he  never  recovered  from  the  shock.  A  man  of  such 
susceptibility  and  overpowering  vividness  of  imagination 
was  fitting  father  to  a  poet.  He  had  literary  neighbors 
also,  like  Pope's  father,  who  encouraged  his  boy  in  verse- 
making.  There  was  Mr.  Riccarton,  minister  of  the 
neighboring  parish  of  Hobkirk,  who  wrote  a  poem  on 
Winter,  and  is  shown  by  that  fact  to  have  been  likely  to 
give  the  author  of  the  "Seasons"  an  early  bias  toward 
the  vein  of  sentiment  and  reflection  that  afterward  took 
possessiop  of  him.  A  neighboring  laird,  Sir  W.  Bennet 
of  Chesters,  also  took  notice  of  the  school-boy,  invited 
him  to  spend  his  summer  holidays  at  his  house,  and,  being 
himself  an  amateur  of  poetry,  encouraged  him  to  com- 
pose verses.  Thomson's  juvenile  verses  must  have  been 
very  clumsy  compared  with  Pope's.  We  have  a  speci- 
men of  them,  published  in  the  Edinburgh  Miscellany  in 
his  twentieth  year,  when  he  had  completed  his  course  of 
studies  in  Arts  in  the  University  of  Edinburgh,  in  which, 
while  the  language  is  rough,  there  is  a  certain  force  and 
freshness  of  vision,  an  air  of  sincere  delight  in  country 
scenes,  evidences  of  unaffected,  loving  observations  of 
country  sports.  There  is  a  story  told  of  Thomson's 
unwillingness  to  leave  Tweedside  for  the  University. 
He  was  sent  to  Edinburgh  on  horseback  with  a  servant, 
but  was  back  before  the  servant,  saying  he  could  study 
as  well  on  the  braes  of  Sou'dean  as  in  Edinburgh. 

To  Edinburgh,  however,  Thomson  had  to  go,  and  the 
whole  family  removed  there  on  the  father's  sudden 
death.  He  was  a  student  in  Divinity  till  1724,  and  in 
October  of  that  year  was  severely  reproved  by  the  Pro- 
fessor for    the   exuberance    of   his   imagination   in    an 


60  A    GROUP   OF    EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY    POETS 

exercise  lecture  on  the  119th  Psalm.  In  March,  1725, 
armed  with  introductions  from  an  aristocratic  friend  of 
his  mother's,  the  Lady  Grizel  Baillie,  he  went  in  quest  of 
Fortune  to  London,  where  a  college  friend  of  his,  David 
Mallet,  was  already  settled  as  tutor  in  the  family  of  the 
Duke  of  Montrose.  Thomson  also  obtained  a  tutor- 
ship,— in  the  family  of  Lord  Binning,  son-in-law  of  his 
Edinburgh  patroness, — but  held  it  only  for  a  few  months. 
It  seems  to  have  been  in  the  neighborhood  of  Lord 
Binning's  house  at  Barnet  that  the  idea  of  writing  a 
poem  on  Winter  first  took  shape  in  Thomson's  mind. 
The  approach  of  winter  in  1725  found  him  in  circum- 
stances in  which  he  needed  all  the  consolations  of  a 
warm  imagination.  His  mother  had  died  a  few  weeks 
after  he  parted  from  her  at  Leith,  and  he  was  himself 
in  pecuniary  straits,  with  but  little  prospect  of, realizing 
the  hopes  with  which  he  had  come  to  the  capital.  Read 
the  opening  lines  of  "  Winter  "  with  this  knowledge  of 
the  poet's  circumstances,  and  you  will  see  how  natural 
it  was  that  such  thoughts  should  come  into  his  mind  as 
he  walked  to  and  from  his  country  lodging,  with  eyes 
that  had  long  been  accustomed  to  watch  changes  in  the 
sky  and  on  the  face  of  the  earth — turning  to  them  now 
for  relief  from  his  own  cheerless  looking  future.  Very 
different  this  from  the  situation  of  the  artist  Pope,  for 
whom  poetry  was  not  a  consolation  for  desperate  cir- 
cumstances, but  a  business  pursued  with  ease  and  de- 
liberation. 

"  See,  Winter  comes,  to  rule  the  varied  year, 
Sullen  and  sad,  with  all  his  rising  train  ; 
Vapors,  and  clouds,  and  storms.     Be  these  my  theme. 
These  !  that  exalt  the  soul  to  solemn  thought 
And  heavenly  musing.     Welcome,  kindred  glooms, 
Congenial  horrors,  hail  !  with  frequent  foot, 
Pleased  have  I,  in  my  cheerful  morn  of  life, 
When  nursed  by  careless  Solitude  I  lived     * 
And  sung  of  Nature  with  unceasing  joy, 
Pleased  have  I  wander'd  through  your  rough  domain  ; 


Thomson's  motive  in  writing  "winter"       61 

Trod  the  pure  virgin-snows,  myself  as  pure  ; 
Heard  the  winds  roar,  and  the  big  torrent  burst  ; 
Or  seen  the  deep-fermenting  tempest  brew'd 
In  the  grim  evening  sky.     Thus  pass'd  the  time 
Till  through  the  lucid  chambers  of  the  south 
Look'd  out  the  joyous  Spring,  look'd  out  and  smiled." 

Descriptive  poetry,  it  seems  to  me, — i.  e.,  poetry- 
descriptive  of  inanimate  nature, — must  always  be  more 
or  less  dull  unless  we  have  some  clue  to  the  mood  of  the 
poet.  The  description  then  lives  for  us  as  an  expres- 
sion of  the  writer's  ruling  emotion  ;  it  acquires  human 
interest.  Of  course  the  human  interest  of  Thomson's 
descriptions  is  not  always  due  to  the  colors  thrown 
upon  them  by  his  own  hopes  and  fears  for  himself  ;  it  is 
only  passages  here  and  there  that  have  a  direct  bio- 
graphical interest.  The  gloomy  notes  of  the  opening 
of  his  poem  on  Winter  are  only  significant  of  the  mood 
in  which  lie  began  the  poem  ;  once  fairly  absorbed  in 
his  subject,  he  seems,  as  it  were,  to  have  been  carried  on 
the  wings  of  imagination  far  above  and  away  from 
the  anxieties  of  his  own  life,  up  into  sublime  contem- 
plation of  the  great  forces  of  Nature,  and  into  warm 
sympathy  with  the  human  hardships  and  enjoyments, 
horrors  and  amusements,  peculiar  to  the  season.  When 
Thomson  is  called  a  descriptive  poet,  it  must  be  remem- 
bered that  he  not  merely  describes  Nature  with  the 
minute  fidelity  of  a  landscape  painter  ;  it  is  alwa}7s 
Nature  in  its  relation  to  man  ;  the  ways  and  the  feelings 
of  man  have  even  greater  interest  for  him  than  the 
changing  appearances  of  sky  and  earth  and  sea.  The 
secret  of  his  extraordinary  popularity  is  that  he 
describes  in  sonorous  and  dignified  verse  not  only  what 
all  men  must  see  as  long  as  the  seasons  endure,  but  also 
■what  all  men  must  feel  as  long  as  they  are  affected  by 
the  changes  of  the  seasons,  and  have  hearts  to  feel  for 
one  another's  joys  and  pains. 

The  poem  of  "  Winter,"  published  in  the  spring  of 


62     A  GROUP  OF  EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY  POETS 

1726,  leaped  at  once  into  popularity.  Two  editions  were 
exhausted  in  a  few  months.  The  freshness  of  the  poem 
must  have  helped  it  greatly  with  the  fastidious  coffee- 
house critics  of  the  time.  Nobody  since  Milton  had 
handled  blank  verse  with  such  power.  The  subject 
also  was  fresh  ;  no  poet  since  Milton  had  lighted  on 
such  a  theme  for  sublimity  of  imagination  and  breadth 
of  human  interest.  It  came  to  Thomson  quite  spon- 
taneously ;  from  his  own  hardships  to  the  general  hard- 
ships of  all  living  things  in  winter,  and  the  efforts  of 
man  to  make  the  most  of  the  gloomy  season,  was  a 
natural  transition  ;  and,  coming  to  him  as  a  happy 
thought,  the  subject  was  treated  with  genuine  enthu- 
siasm. And  if  we  look  at  the  general  structure  of 
the  poem,  we  see  another  thing  that  must  have  struck 
the  critics  of  the  time  as  a  novelty.  It  was  an  innova- 
tion upon  the  classical  structure.  It  does  not  follow 
any  predetermined  scheme  or  plan,  beyond  beginning 
with  the  storms  of  early  winter,  and  ending  with  the 
thaw  that  heralds  the  approach  of  spring.  The  poet 
leaves  himself  free  to  digress  wherever  casual  associa- 
tions may  lead  him. 

The  best  way  of  giving  an  idea  of  Thomson's  method 
and  style  will  be  to  follow  the  course  of  this  his  first, 
freshest,  and  most  powerful  poem.  He  begins,  as  I  have 
said,  after  a  short  introduction,  with  a  description  of  the 
black  skies,  heavy  rains,  and  floods  of  early  winter  : 

"  Then  comes  the  father  of  the  tempest  forth, 
Wrapt  in  black  glooms.     First  joyless  rains  obscure 
Drive  through  the  mingling  skies  with  vapour  foul  ; 
Dash  on  the  mountain's  brow,  and  shake  the  woods, 
That  grumbling  wave  below.     The  unsightly  plain 
Lies  a  brown  deluge  ;  as  the  low-bent  clouds 
Pour  flood  on  flood,  yet  unexhausted  still 
Combine,  and  deepening  into  night,  shut  up 
The  day's  fair  face.    .    . 

Wide  o'er  the  brim,  with  many  a  torrent  swelled, 
And  the  mix'd  ruin  of  its  banks  o'erspread, 


Thomson's  method  and  style  63 

At  last  the  roused-up  river  pours  along  : 

Resistless,  roaring,  dreadful,  down  it  comes 

From  the  rude  mountain,  and  the  mossy  wild, 

Tumbling  through  rocks  abrupt,  and  sounding  far  ; 

Then  o'er  the  sanded  valley  floating  spreads, 

Calm,  sluggish,  silent ;  till  again,  constrained 

Between  two  meeting  hills,  it  bursts  away, 

When  rocks  and  woods  o'erhang  the  turbid  stream  ; 

There  gathering  triple  force,  rapid  and  deep, 

It  boils,  and  wheels,  and  foams,  and  thunders  through." 

Then  follows  the  description  of  a  storm,  preceded  by 
an  invocation  to  the  winds,  in  the  style  of  personification 
now  obsolete.  It  is  obsolete  ;  not  so  the  description  of 
the  storm  itself.  There  is  a  real  picture  before  his 
mind's  eye  as  he  describes  ;  and  he  is  intent  above  every 
thing  in  bodying  forth  this  picture  to  his  reader. 
Heightening  the  effect  at  the  end  by  the  addition  of 
superstitious  horrors  may  be  said  to  be  conventional  : 

"  Ye  too,  ye  winds  !  that  now  begin  to  blow 
With  boisterous  sweep,  I  raise  my  voice  to  you. 
Where  are  your  stores,  ye  powerful  beings  !  say, 
Where  your  aerial  magazines  reserved, 
To  swell  the  brooding  terrors  of  the  storm  ? 
In  what  far  distant  region  of  the  sky, 
Hush'd  in  deep  silence,  sleep  you  when  'tis  calm  ? 

.    .    .    Red  fiery  streaks 
Begin  to  flush  around.     The  reeling  clouds 
Stagger  with  dizzy  poise,  as  doubting  yet 
Which  master  to  obey  ;  while  rising  slow, 
Blank,  in  the  leaden-colour'd  east,  the  moon 
Wears  a  wan  circle  round  her  blunted  horns. 

.    .    .    The  cormorant  on  high 
Wheels  from  the  deep,  and  screams  along  the  land. 
Loud  shrieks  the  soaring  hern  ;  and  with  wild  wing 
The  circling  sea-fowl  cleave  the  flaky  clouds. 

Meanwhile,  the  mountain  billows,  to  the  clouds 
In  dreadful  tumult  swell'd,  surge  above  surge 
Burst  into  chaos  with  tremendous  roar, 
And  anchored  navies  from  their  station  drive, 


64  A    GROUP    OF    EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY    POETS 

Wild  as  the  winds  across  the  howling  waste 

Of  mighty  waters.    .    . 

The  whirling  tempest  raves  along  the  plain  ; 

And  on  the  cottage  thatch'd,  or  lordly  roof, 

Keen-fastening,  shakes  them  to  the  solid  base. 

Sleep  frighted  flies  ;  and  round  the  rocking  dome, 

For  entrance  eager,  howls  the  savage  blast. 

Then  too,  they  say,  through  all  the  burdened  air, 

Long  groans  are  heard,  shrill  sounds,  and  distant  sighs 

That  utter'd  by  the  demon  of  the  night, 

Warn  the  devoted  wretch  of  woe  and  death." 

Then  lie  imagines  the  storm  to  subside  at  midnight, 
and  gives  his  midnight  reflections  : 

"  Nature's  king,  who  oft 
Amid  tempestuous  darkness  dwells  alone, 
And  on  the  wings  of  the  careering  wind 
Walks  dreadfully  serene,  commands  a  calm  ; 
Then  straight,  air,  sea,  and  earth,  are  hush'd  at  once. 

Now,  while  the  drowsy  world  lies  lost  in  sleep, 
Let  me  associate  with  the  serious  Night, 
And  Contemplation,  her  sedate  compeer  ; 
Let  me  shake  off  the  intrusive  cares  of  day, 
And  lay  the  meddling  senses  all  aside." 

Next  comes  his  famous  description  of  a  snow-storm, 
followed  by  his  touching  narrative  of  the  shepherd  lost 
in  the  snow  : 

"  As  thus  the  snows  arise  ;  and  foul,  and  fierce, 
All  Winter  drives  along  the  darken'd  air  ; 
In  his  own  loose-revolving  fields  the  swain 
Disaster'd  stands  ;  sees  other  hills  ascend, 
Of  unknown,  joyless  brow  ;  and  other  scenes 
Of  horrid  prospect  shag  the  trackless  plain. 
Nor  finds  the  river,  nor  the  forest,  hid 
Beneath  the  formless  wild  ;  but  wanders  on 
Prom  hill  to  dale,  still  more  and  more  astray  ; 
Impatient  flouncing  through  the  drifted  heaps, 
Stung  with  the  thoughts  of  home  ;  the  thoughts  of  home 
Rush  on  his  nerves,  and  call  their  vigour  forth 
In  many  a  vain  attempt. 


DESCRIPTION    OF    A    SNOW-STORM  65 

.    .    .    Down  he  sinks 
Beneath  the  shelter  of  the  shapeless  drift, 
Thinking  o'er  all  the  bitterness  of  death, 
Mixed  with  the  tender  anguish  Nature  shoots 
Through  the  wrung  bosom  of  the  dying  man  ; 
His  wife,  his  children,  and  his  friends  unseen. 
In  vain  for  him  the  officious  wife  prepares 
The  fire  fair-blazing  and  the  vestment  warm  ; 
In  vain  his  little  children,  peeping  out 
Into  the  mingling  storm,  demand  their  sire 
With  tears  of  artless  innocence.     Alas  ! 
Nor  wife,  nor  children,  more  shall  he  behold. 
Nor  friends,  nor  sacred  home.     On  every  nerve 
The  deadly  Winter  seizes  ;  shuts  up  sense  ; 
And,  o'er  his  inmost  vitals  creeping  cold, 
Lays  him  along  the  snows,  a  stiffened  corse, 
Stretched  out,  and  bleaching  in  the  northern  blast. 

And  here  can  I  forget  the  generous  band, 

Who,  touched  with  human  woe,  redressive  searched 

Into  the  horrors  of  the  gloomy  jail  ? 

Ye  sons  of  Mercy  !  yet  resume  the  search  ; 
Drag  forth  the  legal  monsters  into  light, 
Wrench  from  their  hands  Oppression's  iron  rod, 
And  bid  the  cruel  feel  the  pains  they  give." 

The  thought  of  this  pathetic  incident  leads  him  to 
reflect  on  the  broad  contrast  between  rich  and  poor  ; 
and  there  next  appears  in  his  poem  the  first  notable 
reference  in  our  literature  to  the  great  humanitarian 
movement  for  reforming  the  horrors  of  prison  life,  with 
which  the  name  of  Howard  is  associated.  Winter 
scenes  at  home  lead  to  winter  scenes  on  the  Alps,  on  the 
Pyrenees  and  the  Apennines,  and  lie  draws  a  thrill- 
ing picture  of  the  bands  of  wrolves  that  prowl  over 
the  snowy  wastes.  Then  he  passes  to  his  own  ideal 
of  enjoyment  in  winter,  in  a  retreat 

"Between  the  groaning  forest  and  the  shore," 

with  chosen  books  and  chosen  friends.     Next  he  takes 
up  winter  enjo}^ments  in  the   village  and   in  the  city, 


66  A    GKOUP    OF    EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY    POETS 

pausing  by  the  way  to  denounce  gaming,  and  eulogize 
Lord  Chesterfield.  From  this  he  returns  to  a  descrip- 
tion of  Nature  under  frost,  and  games  on  the  ice  ;  this 
leads  him  to  winter  in  the  Arctic  regions,  the  life  of  the 
Laplanders,  the  fate  of  Sir  Hugh  Willoughby  the  Arctic 
explorer,  and  the  romantic  career  of  Peter  the  Great. 
Then  follows  the  thaw,  and  the  concluding  reflections 
on  human  destiny. 

The  best  of  Thomson's  "Seasons"  is  undoubtedly 
"  Winter,"  though  "  Autumn  "  probably  surpasses  it  in 
technical  skill.  He  wrote  more  slowly  and  laboriously 
after  his  first  success  ;  and  there  are  more  frequent 
traces  in  his  other  seasons  of  deliberate  imitation  of 
Virgil's  "  Georgics,"  and  deliberate  search  for  good 
descriptive  topics.  "  Summer,"  the  longest,  appeared 
in  1727  ;  "  Spring  "  in  1728  ;  and  "  Autumn  "  in  1730. 
The  "  Seasons,"  as  now  printed,  contain  man}'  later 
revisions  and  additions,  in  some  of  which  he  had  the 
assistance  of  Pope. 

The  best  way  to  read  these  poems  is  not  to  read  them 
through  ;  but  to  take  the  argument  and  pick  out  any 
theme  that  strikes  you  as  interesting.  You  will  thus 
best  appreciate  the  "  bold  description  and  the  manly 
thought "  to  which  the  poet  laid  claim.  Avoid 
"  Spring,"  and  his  tedious  description  of  the  golden  age, 
and  the  influence  of  the  season  on  birds  and  beasts,  and 
fishes  and  men. 

Between  1730  and  1748  Thomson  produced  little 
worthy  of  remembrance.  His  song  "  Rule  Britannia  " 
appeared  in  1740,  in  a  mask  of  "  Alfred,"  written  by 
him  in  conjunction  with  David  Mallet.  The  "  Castle 
of  Indolence"  was  published  in  the  last  year  of  his 
life. 

The  "  Seasons  "  remained  Thomson's  great  achieve- 
ment. It  was  a  striking  but  not  inexplicable  fact  that 
contact  with  London  literary  society,  to  which  he  was 
at  once  admitted  on  the  success  of  "  Winter,"  paralyzed 


INFLUENCE    OF    LONDON    LITERARY    SOCIETY  67 

his  poetic  faculty,  or  at  best  robbed  it  of  half  its  strength. 
He  had  written  with  comparatively  unconscious  freedom 
before,  with  the  victorious  joy  of  reaching  and  even  sur- 
passing his  brightest  ideals  of  poetic  achievement  ;  con- 
tact with   a  more  critical  society,  and  more  exacting 
standards  of  literary  finish,  seems  to  have  bred  self-dis- 
trust.    In  compliance  with  the  taste  of  his  new  com- 
panions, he  became   more   ambitious  of  displaying  his 
learning,  and  chose  topics  in   which  it  Avas  easier  than 
in  the  description  of  the  "  Seasons  "  to  show  an  acquaint- 
ance with  history  and  political  philosophy.     He  used  his 
metrical  power  also  in  the  service  of  politics.     His  first 
political  venture,  "Britannia,"  published  in  1729,  when 
the  nation  was  intensely  excited  over  attempts  by  Spain 
to  challenge  our  then  newly  won  dominion  of  the  seas, 
was  immensely  popular.     But  it  owed  its  success  to  its 
opportuneness,    rather   than    to   its   power,   though   its 
strains  were  ardent  and  vigorous  enough.     We  are  apt, 
perhaps,  to  underrate  the  force  of  Thomson's  patriotic 
verses,  from  forgetting  that  he  did   much  to  foster  the 
national  sentiment,  and  was  the  original  author  of  many 
expressions   that  have  since  become  the  commonplace 
expressions  of  that  sentiment.     Some  lines  sound  like 
very  hackneyed  stump  declamation,  but  they  had  more 
heart  and  meaning  in  the  mouth  of  the  poet  of  the  first 
generation  of  British  ascendancy,  when  Britain,  consoli- 
dated by  the  union  of  the  Kingdoms,  and  by  the  Treaty 
of    Utrecht,    acknowledged    victor    in    the    protracted 
struggle   for   the   empire   of   the  seas  and  of  the   new 
worlds,  was  glowing   with    the   intoxication  of   newly 
acquired  power.     But  Thomson's  next  and  much  longer 
political  poem,  "  Liberty  "  (1734),  in  which  he  narrated 
the  career  of  this  goddess,  and  described  the  glories  that 
she  created  in  Greece  and  Rome,  before  fixing  her  home 
in  Britain,  fell  flat,  though  the  composition  of  it  was  his 
chief  labor  for  three  years.     This  was  the  poem  which 
Johnson  owns  he  could  not  finish  ;  and  about  which  a 


68  A    GROUP    OF    EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY    POETS 

contemporary  wit  remarked  that  the  poet  "had  taken  a 
liberty  which  was  not  agreeable  to  Britannia  in  any 
season."  Thomson  also  wrote  for  the  stage,  but  without 
success,  his  one  memorable  triumph  being  the  song  of 
"  Rule  Britannia."  Although  Thomson  published  some- 
times by  subscription,  he  made  but  a  poor  income  out 
of  his  poetry,  and  he  was  unfortunate  in  his  sinecures. 
Lord  Chancellor  Talbot,  whose  son  he  had  accompanied 
as  tutor  to  Italy,  made  him  Secretary  of  Briefs  in  the 
Court  of  Chancery,  and  he  held  this  office  for  rather  more 
than  three  years  (December,  1*733,  to  February,  173V), 
losing  it  on  the  death  of  his  patron.  The  Prince  of 
Wales  gave  him  for  some  years  a  pension  of  one  hun- 
dred pounds,  but  withdrew  it  in  a  pet.  From  1744  till 
his  death  he  held  the  sinecure  office  of  one  of  the  Com- 
missioners for  the  Leeward  Islands. 

Thomson  must  be  acknowledged  to  be  one  of  the 
greatest  of  our  minor  poets — i.  e.,  of  those  that  are 
ranked  next  to  the  great  names  of  Chaucer,  Spenser, 
Shakespeare,  Milton,  Wordsworth,  and  Byron.  He 
holds  this  place  in  virtue  of  his  vigor  of  imagination, 
his  broad  manly  sentiment,  the  individuality  of  his 
verse,  and  the  distinction  of  his  subject.  These  have 
given  him  a  remarkable  and  enduring  popularity.  And 
measured  by  his  influence  on  succeeding  literature,  his 
is  by  far  the  greatest  figure  among  minor  poets.  Both 
in  his  use  of  blank  verse,  and  in  the  easy  discursive 
general  structure  of  his  poems  on  the  Seasons,  he  had 
many  imitators,  the  most  eminent  of  whom  was  the 
poet  Cowper.  And  his  influence  reached  into  our  own 
century.  It  was  most  marked  on  Wordsworth  ;  and 
the  fact,  just  put  on  record  by  Mrs.  Richmond  Ritchie 
(Miss  Thackeray),  that  Thomson's  "Seasons"  was  the 
first  poetry  known  to  Tennyson  in  his  boyhood  enables 
us  to  understand  whence  our  Laureate  received  the 
impulse  to  his  minute  observation  of  Nature  and  country 
life. 


dyer's  "grongak  hill"  69 

A  word  or  two  on  another  poet,  also  nourished  by 
influences  outside  Pope's  circle,  but,  unlike  Thomson, 
never  brought  within  that  circle,  John  Dyer.  He  was 
the  son  of  a  Welsh  solicitor,  but  abandoned  the  law 
himself  for  painting  and  poetry,  and  in  his  early  man- 
hood apparently  wandered  about  South  Wales  as  an 
itinerant  painter,  rhyming  as  he  went.  He  was  born 
in  the  same  year  with  Thomson,  and  his  first  and  best 
poem,  "Grongar  Hill,"  appeared  in  Lewis's  Miscellany 
in  1726,  in  the  same  year  with  Thomson's  "Winter." 
It  is  a  sweet  little  descriptive  poem,  in  the  four-ac- 
cent measure  of  Milton's  "  L'Allegro,"  as  pure  and 
fresh  and  clear  in  its  vision  of  natural  objects  as  any 
thing  written  by  any  of  the  Lakers,  and  exquisitely 
musical  in  its  numbers.  It  is  Wordsworthian  also  in 
its  moralizing  : 

"  And  see  the  rivers  how  they  run 
Through  woods  and  meads,  in  shade  and  sun  ! 
Sometimes  swift,  sometimes  slow, 
Wave  succeeding  wave,  they  go 
A  various  journey  to  the  deep, 
Like  human  life,  to  endless  sleep  ! 
Thus  is  Nature's  vesture  wrought 
To  instruct  our  wandering  thought  ; 
Thus  she  dresses  green  and  gay, 
To  disperse  oUr  cares  away. 
Ever  charming,  ever  new, 
When  will  the  landscape  tire  the  view  ! 
The  fountain's  fall,  the  river's  flow, 
The  woody  valleys,  warm  and  low  ; 
The  windy  summit,  wild  and  high, 
Roughly  rushing  on  the  sky  ! 
The  pleasant  seat,  the  ruin'd  tower, 
The  naked  rock,  the  shady  bower  ; 
The  town  and  village,  dome  and  farm, 
Each  give  each  a  double  charm. 
As  pearls  upon  an  ^Ethiop's  arm. 

See  on  the  mountain's  southern  side, 
Where  the  prospect  opens  wide, 
Where  the  evening  gilds  the  tide. 


10  A    GROUP    OF   EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY    POETS 

How  close  and  small  the  hedges  lie  ! 
What  streaks  of  meadows  cross  the  eye  ! 
A  step,  niethinks,  may  pass  the  stream — 
So  little  distant  dangers  seem  ; 
So  we  mistake  the  picture's  face, 
Eyed  through  Hope's  deluding  glass  ; 
As  yon  summits  soft  and  fair, 
Clad  in  colours  of  the  air, 
Which  to  those  who  journey  near, 
Barren,  brown,  and  rough  appear  ; 
Still  we  tread  the  same  coarse  way  ; 
The  present's  still  a  cloudy  day." 

In  the  course  of  his  wanderings  as  a  painter  Dyer 
went  to  Rome,  and  on  his  return  in  1740  published  a 
poem  called  "  The  Ruins  of  Rome."  It  is  in  blank 
verse,  most  musical  in  its  rhythm,  and  exquisitely  deli- 
cate and  precise  in  phrase  and  epithet  ;  but  its  declama- 
tory apostrophes  and  exclamations  strike  us  now  as 
somewhat  antiquated  ;  and  its  moralizing  vein  of  melan- 
choly sentiment  may  be  said  to  have  been  superseded 
for  this  century  by  Byron's  stanzas  in  "  Childe  Harold  " 
on  the  ruins  of  Athens. 

The  following  lines  on  Modern  Rome  will  sufficiently 
illustrate  his  treatment  of  blank  verse  : 

"  Behold  by  Tiber's  flood,  where  modern  Rome 
Couches  beneath  the  ruins  :  there  of  old 
With  arms  and  trophies  gleamed  the  field  of  Mars  : 
There  to  their  daily  sports  the  noble  youth 
Rush'd  emulous  ;  to  fling  the  pointed  lance  ; 
To  vault  the  steed  ;  or  with  the  kindling  wheel 
In  dusty  whirlwinds  sweep  the  trembling  goal ; 
Or  wrestling,  cope  with  adverse  swelling  breasts, 
Strong  grappling  arms,  close  heads,  and  distant  feet ; 
Or  clash  the  lifted  gauntlets  ;  there  they  formed 
Their  ardent  virtues  ;  in  the  bossy  piles, 
The  proud  triumphal  arches  ;  all  their  wars, 
Their  conquests,  honours,  in  the  sculptures  live. 
And  see  from  every  gate  those  ancient  roads, 
With  tombs  high  verg'd,  the  solemn  paths  of  Fame  ! 
Deserve  they  not  regard  ?  " 


SOMERVILLe's    "  CHASE  M  11 

On  his  return  to  England  Dyer  entered  the  Church,  and 
reappeared  seventeen  years  later  with  another  poem, 
also  in  blank  verse,  "  The  Fleece."  The  first  lines  will 
give  you  an  idea  of  the  subject  : 

"  The  care  of  sheep,  the  labours  of  the  loom, 
And  arts  of  trade,  I  sing." 

This  poem,  and  Somerville's  "  Chase,"  a  didactic  poem 
on  hunting  (1735),  may  be  numbered  among  the  dis- 
cursive didactic  poems  called  into  being  by  the  success 
of  Thomson's  "  Seasons."  Where  Dyer  treats  of  soils, 
and  pastures,  and  breeds  of  sheep,  and  prohibitive  legis- 
lation against  the  export  of  wool,  and  fulling,  and  weav- 
ing and  dyeing,  and  the  foreign  trade  in  wool,  he  becomes 
more  technical  than  most  readers  of  poetry  are  prepared 
for  ;  but  intermixed  with  these  technicalities  are  some 
of  the  most  exquisite  passages  of  description  in  the 
language.  You  can  easily  get  at  them  by  means  of  the 
argument.  If  all  the  four  books  had  been  like  these,  we 
could  understand  Akenside's  saying  "  that  he  would 
regulate  his  opinion  of  the  reigning  taste  by  Dyer's 
'  Fleece  '  ;  for  if  that  were  ill  received,  he  should  not 
think  it  any  longer  reasonable  to  expect  fame  from 
excellence." 


CHAPTER  VI 

pope — continued 

AS  A  SATIRIST  AND  MORALIST — FAILURE  IN    EPIC  POETRY — "  THE 
DUNCIAD  " — "ESSAY  ON   MAN" 

We  have  to  deal  to-day  with  Pope  as  a  satirist  and  a 
moralist.  His  "  Dunciad  "  (1728),  his  "  Essay  on  Man  " 
(1732-34),  "  Moral  Essays  "  (1735),  and  his  "  Imitations 
of  Horace"  (1733-37)  were  the  great  literary  events 
of  the  fifteen  years  after  the  publication  of  Thomson's 
"  Seasons,"  and  showed  the  author  in  a  new  vein.  They 
were  a  series  of  surprises  as  far  as  Pope  was  concerned, 
works  that  his  previous  performances  had  not  prepared 
the  public  to  expect. 

Pope's  translation  of  Homer  and  his  editions  of 
Shakespeare  occupied  him  till  1725,  when  he  had 
reached  the  age  of  thirty-seven,  and  was  in  the  maturity 
of  his  powers,  with  an  independence  secured  by  the 
enormous  profits  of  his  Homer.  Then  began  the 
third  period  of  his  literary  career.  The  works  that  he 
then  produced,  and  which  I  have  already  enumerated, 
are  his  greatest  works  in  point  of  literary  power.  But 
why  did  he  not  then  produce  works  of  more  permanent 
and  universal  interest  ?  Why  did  he  not  then  return 
to  his  youthful  scheme  of  writing  a  great  epic  ?  The 
critics  of  this  century  have  refused  Pope  a  place  by  the 
side  of  Milton,  because  his  subjects  were  of  inferior 
quality,  appealing  to  a  lower  range  of  human  emotion, 
and  incapable  from  their  very  nature,  however  excel- 
lent the  treatment  of  them,  of  being  made  the  subjects 
of  equally  great  poetic  achievements.  Now,  Pope,  as 
we  have  seen,  was  fully  possessed   of  the  idea  that  a 

72 


A    PROJECTED    EPIC  73 

great  epic  was  the  greatest  work  that  a  poet  could  ac- 
complish ;  why,  then,  when  he  was  free  to  choose,  did 
he  not  undertake  such  a  Avork  ? 

To  answer  this  we  have  to  look  both  to  Pope's 
character  and  to  his  circumstances.  He  toyed  with  the 
idea  of  writing  a  great  epic.  He  told  Spence  that  he 
had  it  all  in  his  head,  and  gave  him  a  vague  sketch  of 
the  subject  and  plan  of  it,  but  he  never  put  any  of  it 
on  paper.  This  indecision  was  partly  due  to  his  char- 
acter and  partly  to  his  circumstances.  Partly  he  shrank 
from  the  labor,  and  partly  he  was  turned  aside  by  cir- 
cumstances to  other  labors  which  fully  occupied  his 
energies.  One  reason  why  great  epics  are  rare  is  that 
the  composition  of  them,  in  addition  to  imaginative 
genius  and  genius  for  rhythmical  expression,  demands 
an  intellectual  staying  power  and  energy  of  will  such 
as  are  rarely  found  in  human  beings  with  or  without 
the  poet's  special  gifts.  Reflect  for  a  moment  on  the 
intellectual  force  that  a  poet  must  exert  in  writing  a 
tragedy.  To  give  moving  expression  to  a  single  tragic 
situation,  to  imagine  and  body  forth  in  language  that 
all  men  feel  to  be  true  to  nature  the  changes  of  passion 
in  the  heart  of  one  character  in  one  of  the  scenes  in 
"  Macbeth,"  or  "  Hamlet,"  or  "  Othello,"  so  that  not  a 
line  shall  ring  false,  requires  no  ordinary  intellectual 
concentration  ;  but  to  exhibit  in  a  succession  of  scenes, 
each  profoundly  wrought  out,  a  progression  of  events 
toward  a  tragic  catastrophe,  bringing  many  agencies  to 
bear,  and  assigning  to  each  its  right  influence,  giving 
voice  to  many  and  various  passionate  emotions,  sustain- 
ing at  every  moment  and  gradually  deepening  the 
interest  of  the  hearer,  observing  the  hundred  conditions 
of  tragic  effect — this  puts  an  immensely  greater  strain  on 
the  strength  of  intellect  and  will.  Unless  the  poet  goes 
right  by  a  sort  of  instinct,  borne  along  in  a  rapturous  de- 
light with  each  triumphant  step,  he  must  collapse  ;  but 
instinct  in  this  case  is  only  another  name  for  intellect, 


74  POPE 

one,  however,  that  can  hold  in  its  grasp  at  once  and  sat- 
isfy at  once  the  conflicting  claims  of  a  multitude  of  condi- 
tions which  a  weaker  intellect  can  grasp  only  one  by  one, 
and  can  never  fully  reconcile,  because  it  can  never  bring 
them  all  together.  It  may  be  doubted  whether  the 
strain  is  equally  great  in  epic,  because  the  difficulties  do 
not  occur  with  the  same  cumulative  importunity;  they 
admit  of  being  vanquished,  if  not  singly,  at  least  in 
smaller  detachments.  Still,  even  in  epic,  the  strain  is 
such  as  few  men  in  the  history  of  literature  have  proved 
equal  to,  though  multitudes  have  tried.  Now,  Pope,  as 
you  know,  was  not  constitutionally  a  strong  man.  I 
am  not  here  speaking  of  muscular  strength,  but  of 
constitutional  strength.  His  life,  as  he  said  in  the 
prologue  to  his  "  Satires,"  was  one  long  disease.  It  has 
always  been  a  matter  of  wonder  that,  to  use  Mr.  Leslie 
Stephen's  phrase,  he  got  as  much  work  out  of  his  frail 
body  as  he  did.  One  of  the  secrets  of  his  endurance 
was  that  he  worked  in  comparative  tranquillity.  He 
avoided  the  stress  and  strain  of  complicated  designs, 
and  applied  himself  to  designs  that  could  be  accom- 
plished in  detail — works  of  which  the  parts  could  be 
separately  labored  and  put  together  with  patient  care, 
into  which  happy  thoughts  could  be  fitted,  struck  out  at 
odd  moments,  and  in  ordinary  levels  of  feeling.  Even 
the  work  of  translating  the  "  Iliad,"  a  very  different 
work  from  creating  an  epic,  weighed  very  heavily  on 
his  spirits.  After  he  was  fairly  committed  to  it  he 
told  Spence  he  was  often  under  great  pain  and  appre- 
hension. "  I  dreamed  often,"  he  said,  "  of  being  engaged 
in  a  long  journey,  and  that  I  should  never  get  to  the 
end  of  it." 

This  shrinking  from  sustained  intellectual  strain,  to  be 
prolonged  day  after  day  for  weeks  or  months  or  years, — 
for  a  great  epic  cannot  be  written  in  a  day, — was  prob- 
ably one  of  the  reasons  why  Pope  did  not  attempt  an 
epic,  though  he  liked  to  think  over  subjects.     The  hero 


MOTIVES   FOR    "WRITING   THE    "  DUNCIAD  "  75 

of  the  one  that  he  had  planned  was  the  legendary 
Brutus,  the  Trojan  colonizer  and  name-father  of  Britain, 
the  invention  of  the  fertile  romancers  of  the  twelfth  cen- 
tury. Pope  proposed  to  describe  how  he  established 
civil  and  ecclesiastical  order  in  England — a  theme,  you 
will  observe,  that  could  have  been  treated  in  cold  blood. 
We  have  probably  not  lost  much  from  his  never  having 
carried  out  this  design.  It  may  be  doubted  whether  he 
had  the  intellectual  strength  for  a  great  epic,  though  in 
the  "  Eloisa  and  Abelard  "  he  showed  himself  capable  of 
dealing  powerfully  with  a  single  tragical  situation. 

But  now  to  consider  the  circumstances  that  diverted 
him  from  attempting  such  an  epic  as  he  was  capable  of, 
and  led  him  into  the  walks  of  satire,  in  which  for  keen- 
ness and  brilliancy  of  point  he  has  never  been  surpassed. 
Imitating  the  epic  style,  we  must  ask  our  Muse  of 
Literary  History  :  "  Tell  me,  O  Muse,  what  dire  offence 
moved  the  great  Pope  to  make  war  upon  the  little 
dunces.  Who  were  the  dunces,  and  what  had  they  done 
to  provoke  his  ire,  so  that  he  spent  some  years  in  com- 
posing an  elaborate  poem  designed  to  subject  them  to 
everlasting  ridicule  ?  " 

"The  history  of  the  'Dunciad,'"  Johnson  says  in  his 
"  Life  of  Pope,"  "  is  minutely  related  by  Pope  himself, 
in  a  dedication  which  he  wrote  to  Lord  Middlesex  in  the 
name  of  Savage."  According  to  this  account,  the  origin 
of  the  poem  was  very  simple.  Pope  and  one  or  two  of 
his  intimate  friends,  notably  Swift  and  Arbuthnot,  were 
great  connoisseurs  of  good  poetry,  and  one  of  their 
favorite  amusements, — they  had  formed  a  little  club  for 
the  purpose  in  the  reign  of  Anne,  fifteen  years  before 
the  publication  of  the  "  Dunciad," — was  to  make  fun  of 
bad  poetry.  With  this  view  the  intimates  had  together 
composed  a  "  Treatise  on  Bathos,  or  the  Art  of  Sinking," 
in  which  they  collected  and  invented  superlative  speci- 
mens of  mixed  metaphors,  preposterous  similes,  and 
generally  of  the  bombast  and  extravagance  and  inanity 


76  pope 

of  bad  poetry,  and  classified  bad  poets  according  to 
their  eminence  in  the  various  arts  of  debasing  instead  of 
elevating  tlieir  subjects.  These  specimens  of  the  bad 
they  ascribed  to  various  letters  of  the  alphabet,  most  of 
them  taken  at  random.  Well,  no  sooner  was  the  treatise 
published  than  the  infatuated  scribblers  proceeded  to 
take  the  letters  to  themselves,  and  in  revenge  to  fill  the 
newspapers  with  the  most  abusive  falsehoods  and  scur- 
rilities they  could  possibly  devise.  "  This  gave  Mr. 
Pope  the  thought  that  he  had  now  some  opportunity  of 
doing  good  by  detecting  and  dragging  into  light  these 
common  enemies  of  mankind,"  who  for  years  had  been 
anonymously  aspersing  almost  all  the  great  characters 
of  the  age.  Their  persistent  attacks  upon  himself  had 
given  him  a  peculiar  right  to  their  names — and  so  he 
wrote  the  "  Dunciad." 

In  might  seem,  then,  that  the  Muse  of  History  had 
nothing  to  tell,  but  she  is  an  inquisitive  Muse,  and  she 
has  not  remained  satisfied  with  Mr.  Pope's  account.  If 
the  letters  of  the  alphabet  were  distributed  at  random 
among  imaginary  bad  poets,  it  is  the  most  singular 
chance  on  record  that  they  happened  so  often  to  corre- 
spond with  the  initials  of  poets  and  poetasters  of  the 
time.  The  gods  of  the  literary  Olympus,  playing  at  the 
Art  of  Sinking,  were  not  quite  so  innocent  in  their 
amusements  as  Pope  pretended  ;  they  were  rather  like 
the  little  boys  in  the  fable  throwing  stones  at  the  frogs, 
and  they  had  no  right  to  assume  virtuous  airs  when  the 
frogs  protested  and  retaliated.  It  is,  besides,  fatal  to 
the  strict  accuracy  of  Pope's  account  that  the  book  of 
"Miscellanies"  containing  the  treatise  on  the  Bathos 
was  published  in  1727,  while  Pope,  from  his  letters  to 
Swift,  is  known  to  have  been  engnged  on  the  "  Dun- 
ciad "in  1726,  and  from  internal  evidence  is  conjectured 
to  have  begun  it  several  years  earlier.  In  extreme 
opposition  to  Pope's  account  is  another  histoiy  of  the 
affair,  adopted  by  those  who  take  the  worst  view  of  his 


MOTIVES    FOR    WRITING   THE    "  DUNCIAD  "  77 

character,  and  will  have  it  that  be  was  essentially  vin- 
dictive and  malignant.  This  view  is  that  Pope's 
motives  for  writing  the  "  Dunciad  "  were  purely  spiteful 
and  personal  ;  that  as  soon  as  his  hands  were  free  from 
his  translation  of  Homer,  and  his  independence  secured 
by  the  profits  of  that  work,  he  proceeded  to  settle  old 
scores  with  those  who  had  not  spoken  as  favorabl}''  as  he 
liked  about  his  poetry.  There  is  strong  justification  for 
this  view  in  the  fact  that  the  most  prominent  persons 
ridiculed  in  the  "Dunciad"  can  be  shown  to  have  given 
him  offence.  Theobald  or  Tibbald,  the  original  hero  of 
the  poem,  had  criticised  his  edition  of  Shakespeare,  as 
he  thought,  insolently.  Cibber,  in  whose  favor  Tibbald 
was  subsequently  deposed, — the  "  Dunciad  "  received 
many  alterations  and  additions  after  its  first  issue, — had 
ridiculed  a  play  in  which  Pope  in  his  earlier  daj^s  had 
some  share,  and  had  retaliated  on  the  first  mention  of 
his  name  in  the  "  Dunciad. *  Dennis  was  an  old  enemy. 
Lintot,  the  publisher,  had  accused  him  of  unfair  prac- 
tices in  the  division  of  the  profits  of  the  "  Odyssey," 
which  proved  less  successful  than  the  "  Iliad."  And  so 
on.  You  will  find  the  details  in  any  edition  of  the 
"  Dunciad,"  most  fully  in  the  recent  edition  by  Mr. 
Courthope,  who  has  succeeded  Mr.  Elwin  in  the  task 
begun  by  Croker.  Indeed,  it  was  not  denied  by  Pope 
that  the  men  satirized  had  previously  attacked  him  ;  it 
was  openly  avowed,  and  specimens  of  their  attacks  were 
prefixed  to  his  own  complete  edition  ;  it  was  these 
attacks,  he  said,  that  had  given  him  a  right  to  make  use 
of  the  names  of  his  assailants. 

Was  it,  then,  personal  spite,  the  vindictiveness  of 
wounded  vanity,  as  some  critics  think,  or  was  it,  as  he 
professed  himself,  "  the  thought  that  he  had  now  some 
opportunity  of  doing  good,"  that  moved  Pope  to  write 
the  "  Dunciad  "  ?  The  truth  probably  lies  between  the 
two  views.  Both  motives  may  have  operated,  as  well  as 
a  third  not  so  obvious — an  unscrupulous  love  of  fun,  and 


78  pope 

delight  in  the  creations  of  a  humorous  imagination. 
Certainly,  to  represent  the  "Dunciad"  as  the  outcome 
of  mere  personal  spite  is  to  give  an  exaggerated  idea  of 
the  malignity  of  Pope's  disposition,  and  a  wrong  im- 
pression of  his  character.  He  was  not  a  morose,  savage, 
indignant  satirist,  but  airy  and  graceful  in  his  malice, 
writing  more  in  fun  than  in  anger,  revengeful,  perhaps, 
and  excessively  sensitive,  but  restored  to  good-humor  as 
he  thought  over  his  wrongs  by  the  ludicrous  conceptions 
with  which  he  invested  his  adversaries.  We  do  not  feel 
the  bitterness  of  wounded  pride  in  his  writings,  but  the 
laughter  with  which  that  pride  was  consoled.  He  loved 
his  own  comic  fancies  more  than  he  hated  his  enemies. 
His  fun  at  the  expense  of  his  victims  was  so  far  cruel 
that  he  was  quite  regardless  of  their  sufferings,  probably 
enjoyed  them  ;  but  it  was  an  impish  and  sprite-like 
cruelty,  against  which  we  cannot  feel  any  real  indigna- 
tion, because  it  is  substantially  harmless,  while  its  in- 
genious antics  never  fail  to  amuse.  And,  in  extenuation 
of  the  cruelty,  I  see  no  reason  to  reject  Pope's  own  plea 
that  he  never  took  the  aggressive,  although  Mr.  Elwin 
has  attempted  at  great  length  to  show  that  this  could 
not  be  maintained.  In  the  "  Epistle  to  Dr.  Arbuthnot," 
which  is  Pope's  most  elaborate  defence  of  himself  as  a 
satirist,  he  pretends  to  greater  magnanimity  and  lofty 
tranquillity  of  mind  than  any  merely  human  being  can 
possess,  and  which  he  himself  was  undoubtedly  far 
from  possessing,  being  really  extravagantly  sensitive  to 
criticism.  Still,  undue  weight  may  be  given  to  stories 
illustrating  how  keenly  Pope  felt  criticisms  when  first 
they  were  communicated  to  him,  and  how  long  after  an 
offence  had  been  committed  he  seized  an  opportunity 
of  repaying  it.  Granting  the  truth  of  these  stories, 
I  should  still  contend  that  Pope  soon  recovered  his 
equanimity  after  the  first  quick  anger  was  past,  and 
that  there  was  little  or  no  bitterness  in  his  heart  when 
he  took  his  revenge,  and  that  he  reconciled  this  revenge 


INCEPTION    OF    THE    "  DUNCIAD  "  79 

with  a  moral  purpose — the  chastisement  of  men  worthy 
of  chastisement.  The  "  Epistle  to  Arbuthnot,"  I  believe, 
really  represents  his  permanent  attitude  of  mind,  the 
stable  condition  in  which  his  mind  rested  when  it  had 
recovered  from  any  passing  derangement  of  its  equilib- 
rium. 

It  has  been  said  that  to  thoroughly  enjoy  the  "Dun- 
ciad  "  one  would  have  to  give  as  much  time  to  the  study 
of  it  as  the  author  gave  to  its  composition.  That,  of 
course,  is  an  exaggeration  ;  still,  to  appreciate  the  full 
force  of  every  hard  hit  and  sly  pinch,  even  with  the  help 
of  Mr.  Courthope's  ample  commentary,  would  doubtless 
require  long  and  laborious  study.  If  you  have  leisure 
for  it,  it  might  be  worth  while,  because  in  the  process 
you  would  get  an  intimate  knowledge  of  political  and 
literary  life  in  London  in  Pope's  time,  and  it  is  always 
interesting  to  know  how  people  lived  in  circumstances 
different  from  our  own.  This  is  one  of  the  most  harm- 
less ways  of  indulging  that  love  of  gossip  which  is 
deeply  rooted  in  most  human  beings. 

But  without  mastering  all  the  details  we  may  enjoy 
the  "Dunciad"  simply  as  a  work  of  humorous  imagina- 
tion, the  only  drawback  being  the  tendency  of  the 
author's  imagination  to  carry  him  into  physically  dis- 
gusting incidents.  Pope's  original  design  seems  to  have 
been  to  describe  the  progress  of  Dulness  from  ancient 
times  to  his  own  generation,  ascribing  all  the  disasters 
that  happened  to  learning,  such  as  the  burning  of  the 
Library  of  Alexandria  and  the  irruption  of  the  Goths 
into  the  Roman  empire,  as  due  to  the  settled  and 
resolute  hostility  of  this  goddess,  bent  upon  restoring 
the  dominion  that  she  held  while  the  intellectual  world 
was  still  in  chaos.  In  this  history  he  could  find  oppor- 
tunities for  ridiculing  the  so-called  dunces  of  his  own 
time  by  describing  them  and  their  works  as  instruments 
in  the  hands  of  the  goddess  Dulness  for  accomplishing 
her   purpose.     This   was   probably  the   germ,  the  first 


80  POPE 

thought,  of  the  poem  ;  so  that  the  third  book,  from 
1.  70  onward,  was  probably  the  first  part  thought  of, 
if  not  actually  the  first  composed.  But  the  germ  grew 
in  Pope's  mind  ;  and  now  this  history  of  the  reign  of 
Dulness  upon  earth  appears  only  as  a  prophecy  made 
to  the  hero  of  the  poem.  Book  I.  describes  the  abode 
and  the  surroundings  of  Dulness  in  mock-heroic  style, 
but  with  real  splendor  of  imagination  ;  the  goddess 
sits  wreathed  in  clouds  in  a  certain  part  of  the  city  of 
London,  with  her  Prime  Ministers  and  all  the  products 
of  her  leaden  inspiration  round  her.  Then  the  hero, 
Colley  Cibber,  is  described  offering  prayers  and  sacrifices 
to  the  goddess.  She  hears  him  and  carries  him  off  to 
her  sacred  dome,  and  anoints  and  proclaims  him  King 
of  the  Dunces.  Book  II.  describes  the  games  held  in 
honor  of  his  coronation,  a  burlesque  of  the  heroic  cus- 
tom. Much  of  this  you  had  better  skip  ;  but  toward 
the  end  there  is  an  account  of  a  reading  match  anions: 
critics  that  is  very  amusing.  Book  III.  is  chiefby  occu- 
pied with  a  vision  of  the  progress  of  Dulness.  After 
the  games  the  king  falls  asleep  in  the  lap  of  the  goddess, 
and  visits  in  his  dreams — after  the  manner  of  Ulysses 
in  the  "Odyssey"  and  ^Eneas  in  the  "  JEue'id" — the 
nether  regions,  where  he  meets  Settle,  a  dull  poet  of 
the  previous  generation.  Settle  talks  to  him,  and  takes 
him  to  the  top  of  a  mountain,  whence  he  shows  him 
the  past  triumphs  of  the  empire  of  Dulness,  then  the 
present,  and  lastly  the  future.  Book  IV.  was  added  by 
Pope  many  jrears  afterward  (in  1742),  and  professes 
to  be  the  completion  of  the  prophecies  in  Book  III. 
The  goddess  sits  in  state,  surrounded  by  her  flatterers 
and  parasites ;  various  public  bodies  appear  by  dej)- 
utation  before  her  and  report  progress.  The  con- 
clusion is  intensely  comical  ;  in  the  middle  of  a 
gracious  speech  from  the  throne  her  Majesty  yawns, 
and  the  whole  world  follows  suit  and  sinks  into 
slumber ; 


TOTE'S    NOTION    OF    THE    DULL  81 

"  More  she  had  spoke,  but  yawn'd.     All  nature  nods  : 
What  mortal  can  resist  the  yawn  of  gods  ? 
Churches  and  chapels  instantly  it  reached  ; 

(St.  James's  first,  for  leaden  G preached)  ; 

Then  catch'd  the  schools  ;  the  hall  scarce  kept  awake  ; 

The  convocation  gap'd,  but  could  not  speak  : 

Lost  was  the  nation's  sense,  nor  could  be  found, 

While  the  long  solemn  unison  went  round  ; 

Wide,  and  more  wide,  it  spread  o'er  all  the  realm  ; 

Ev'n  Palinurus  nodded  at  the  helm  ; 

The  vapour  mild  o'er  each  committee  crept  ; 

Unfinished  treaties  in  each  office  slept ; 

And  chiefless  armies  dozed  out  the  campaign  ; 

And  navies  yawned  for  orders  on  the  main." 

Apart  from  the  mere  personalities  of  the  poem,  most 
of  the  Dunces  satirized  are  types  that  reappear  in  every 
age.  On  this  ground  some  critics  claim  for  the  poem 
a  universal  utility,  and  praise  Pope  for  having  rendered 
permanent  service  in  the  warfare  of  true  literature 
against  counterfeit.  This  fantastic  Pope  showed  him- 
self perfectly  sensible  that,  in  so  far  as  concerned  the 
annihilation  of  Dunces,  his  work  had  been  written  in 
vain.     Even  of  the  men  ridiculed  by  name,  Pope  says  : 

"  You  think  this  cruel  ?  take  it  for  a  rule 
No  creature  smarts  so  little  as  a  fool. 
Who  shames  a  scribbler  ?  breaks  one  cobweb  thro' 
He  spins  the  slight,  self -pleasing  thread  anew  : 

Throned  in  the  centre  of  his  thin  designs, 
Proud  of  a  vast  extent  of  flimsy  lines, 
Whom  have  I  hurt  ?  has  Poet  yet  or  Peer, 
Lost  the  arch'd  eyebrow,  or  Parnassian  sneer  ? " 

And  if  tins  was  true  of  the  Dunces  exrjressly  ridiculed, 
who  is  likely  in  after  generations  to  take  their  characters 
to  himself  ?  Mr.  Courtbope  specifies  three  classes  of 
Dunces  in  the  poem  :  the  authors  of  personal  scurrilities 
in  the  journals  of  the  day,  who  took  great  liberties  with 
eminent  names,  in  the  same  coarse  vein  in  which  Pope 


82  pope 

replied  to  them  ;  the  party  journalists,  whom  Pope, 
as  a  member  of  the  Opposition,  considered  to  be  in 
ministerial  pay  ;  and  pedantic  scholars,  antiquaries,  and 
naturalists.  In  the  pursuit  of  ridicule  Pope  was  not 
particular  about  truth  to  nature,  and  there  are  two  men 
in  particular  whose  place  in  the  "  Dunciad  "  has  generally 
been  considered  absurd,  Cibber  and  Bentley,  the  great 
classical  scholar.  Cibber  was  a  popular  actor,  and  he 
protested  that  his  greatest  enemy  could  not  call  him 
dull  ;  he  was  nothing  if  not  lively.  But  Pope  did  not 
mean  by  dull  the  opposite  of  lively.  Dulness,  he  saj'S 
in  his  lines  about  Cibber  : 

"  Dulness  with  transport  eyed  the  lively  dunce, 
Remembering  she  herself  was  pertness  once." 

It  is  not,  indeed,  easy  to  say  what  he  did  mean  by  dull, 
except  uninteresting  to  himself.  The  stoiy  is  told  of 
him  that  he  once  fell  asleep  at  his  own  dinner-table 
when  the  Prince  of  Wales  was  talking  to  him  about 
poetry.  With  such  a  man  the  Dull  must  have  been  a 
very  wide  category.  I  am  afraid  he  would  have  con- 
sidered the  critical  study  of  the  "Dunciad  "  insufferably 
dull  if  it  had  been  written  by  any  body  but  himself.  It 
would  seem,  indeed,  as  if  in  the  end  he  had  come  to 
much  the  same  conclusion  as  Thackeray  in  his  "  Book  of 
Snobs."  When  Thackeray  had  carefully  studied  all  the 
varieties  of  snob,  he  could  not  resist  the  humorous  con- 
clusion that  he  might  after  all  be  a  snob  himself.  And 
something  of  the  same  humor  seems  to  me  to  have 
crossed  Pope's  mind  before  he  had  completed  his 
"  Dunciad."  It  is  a  dull  world,  and  we  are  all  dunces 
more  or  less. 

We  have  left  little  time  for  Pope's  remaining  works — 
the  "Essay  on  Man,"  the  "Moral  Essays,"  and  the 
"  Satires  "  and  "  Epistles."  As  regards  the  origin  or 
suggestion  of  them,  they  are  as  much  due  to  the  influ- 
ence of  Bolingbroke  as  the  "  Dunciad "  was  to  Swift 


THEORY    OF    A   RULING   PASSION  83 

and  Arbuthnot.  Then  there  are  the  theological  and 
moral  controversies.  One  little  circumstance  that  has 
not  been  remarked  probably  contributed  to  set  Pope  at 
work  in  this  new  direction.  In  the  year  in  which  he 
finished  his  "  Odyssey"  Young,  afterward  the  author 
of  "  Night  Thoughts,"  published  a  satire  called  "  The 
Universal  Passion,  or  The  Love  of  Fame."  It  is  a  very 
unequal  production,  but  it  was  immensely  popular  for  a 
time.  This  may  have  excited  Pope's  emulation,  more 
particularly  seeing  that  the  satirist — Pope  having  then 
been  engaged  for  ten  years  on  Homer — asked,  Why 
slumbers  Pope  ? 

As  regards  the  substance.  If  you  wish  to  make  a 
study  of  the  "  Essay  on  Man,"  which  professes  to  fur- 
nish in  verse  a  system  of  natural  theology,  I  would 
recommend  you  to  Mark  Pattison's  edition.  Moral 
maxims  tend  to  become  antiquated.  Pope's  are  old 
enough  to  be  commonplace,  but  not  old  enough  to  be 
quaint.  In  the  "  Moral  Essays  "  the  one  you  may  per- 
haps find  the  most  interesting  is  that  on  "  The  Char- 
acters of  Women."  His  standpoint  is  stated  with  per- 
fect candor  in  the  opening  lines  : 

"  Nothing  so  true  as  what  you  once  let  fall, 
'  Most  women  have  no  characters  at  all,' 
Matter  too  soft  a  lasting  mark  to  bear, 
And  best  distinguished  by  black,  brown,  or  fair." 

And  a^ain  in  the  lines  : 

"  In  men,  we  various  ruling  passions  find  ; 
In  women,  two  almost  divide  the  kind  ; 
Those,  only  fix'd,  they  first  or  last  obey, 
The  love  of  pleasure,  and  the  love  of  sway." 

In  these  statements  Pope  repeats  a  commonplace  of 
his  day,  and  if  objection  be  taken  to  them,  we  must  bear 
in  mind  that  we  are  not  to  look  in  satire  for  sober,  strict 


84  pope 

truth,  but  rather  for  brilliant  paradoxes.  The  theory  of 
a  Ruling  Passion  is  probably  a  correct  one,  and  it  has 
been  misunderstood  by  adverse  critics.  Macaulay,  in 
his  essay  on  Mme.  D'Arblay,  calls  it  a  silly  notion,  his 
own  theory  being  that  each  man  is  a  compound  of 
desires  often  at  war  with  one  another,  one  having  the 
ascendancy  sometimes,  and  sometimes  another,  each 
uppermost  by  turns  like  the  spokes  of  a  running  wheel, 
or  the  sails  of  a  windmill,  or  balls  playing  in  a  fountain. 
Where  is  Sbylock's  ruling  passion?  he  asks.  Or 
Othello's  ?  or  Henry  V.'s  ? 

The  theory  is  declared  to  be  at  variance  with  the 
diversity  of  nature.  Rightly  understood,  it  was  not  so. 
Its  advocates  only  contended  that,  however  various 
might  be  the  passions  of  mankind,  however  often  they 
might  come  in  conflict,  still  there  was  one  before  which, 
when  it  came  to  a  fight,  every  other  yielded.  Under- 
standing the  theory  in  this  way,  we  should  have  no 
hesitation  in  saying  that  Shylock  had  a  ruling  passion — 
the  hatred  of  a  persecuted  race  for  its  persecutors. 
Even  his  love  of  money  gives  way  before  this,  as  his 
affection  for  his  daughter  gives  way  before  his  love  of 
money.  The  strength  of  his  ruling  passion  is  indeed 
indicated  by  its  triumph  over  the  passion  next  to  the 
throne  when  the  two  come  in  conflict.  He  has  few 
opportunities,  only  one  indeed  in  the  course  of  the  play, 
of  obtaining  substantial  gratification  for  it  ;  that  one 
he  eagerly  and  fiercely  seizes  on. 

It  cannot,  of  course,  be  said  that  such  a  passion  is  the 
key  to  all  the  mysteries  of  a  man's  nature  ;  that  is,  of 
course,  a  rhetorical  expression.  But  a  knowledge  of  it 
may  be  a  clue  to  the  secret  of  a  man's  deviations  from 
the  rules  of  oixlinary  prudence  or  ordinary  good  feeling. 
It  is  seldom  that  one  overgrown  propensity  swallows  up 
all  the  rest.  True  ;  but  unless  this  is  the  case  the  char- 
acter attracts  no  interest,  because  it  possesses  no  singu- 
larity, nothing  to  distinguish  it  from  the  mass  of  man- 


THJEOKY    OF    A   RULING    PASSION  85 

kind,  whose  ruling  passion  is  selfishness  tempered  by 
sympathetic  impulse,  and  fear  of  what  people  will  say 
and  do.  That  this  is  the  right  interpretation  of  the 
theory  3'ou  can  prove  by  taking  Pope's  examples.  It 
explains  a  man's  singularities  ;  gives  unity  to  his  pecul- 
iarities as  distinguished  from  others. 


CHAPTER  VII 

POETRY    BETWEEN   POPE    AND    COWPER 

GLOVER— JOHNSON— COLLINS — THE      POET     AND     THE     ORATOR — 

GRAY 

I  propose  to-day  to  run  rapidly  over  the  poetry  of 
the  forty  years,  roughly  speaking,  between  Pope  and 
Cowper,  Crabbe  and  Burns,  dwelling  more  particularly 
on  the  poetry  of  Gray  and  Collins.  This  period  is 
generally  and  justly  regarded  as  one  of  the  most  barren 
in  our  literature.  The  poems  that  have  any  interest, 
except  for  the  antiquary,  are  few  and  far  between. 
Collins  and  Gray  wrote  very  little,  very  much  less  than 
any  poets  of  equal  rank  in  literature  ;  the  one  dying 
young,  and  the  other  composing  at  rare  intervals. 
Small  as  their  poetry  is  in  amount,  it  stands  out  above 
the  level  of  the  time,  owing  to  its  originality  and  indi- 
viduality ;  all  the  others  may  be  roughly  classed  as 
imitators  either  of  Pope  or  of  Thomson,  or  of  both. 

If  we  look  at  the  works  of  the  young  poets  who 
ventured  to  publish  during  the  last  years  of  Pope's  life, 
what  principally  strikes  us  is  that,  with  the  exception  of 
Gray  and  Collins,  the  ablest  of  them  Avere  guided  in 
their  aims  by  the  poetical  ambitions  of  Queen  Anne 
society.  One  youth,  a  London  merchant,  Richard 
Glover,  was  bold  enough  to  attempt  what  Pope  shrank 
from,  the  composition  of  a  great  epic.  The  subject  was 
taken  from  Greek  history,  but  the  poet  throughout  had 
an  allusive  eye  to  contemporary  politics.  This  reference 
to  practical  affairs  was  thoroughly  in  the  Queen  Anne 
spirit,  when    the   poets,  as   I   explained   to   you,  being 


GLOVER'S    "  LEONIDAS  "  87 

intimate  companions  of  public  men,  took  sides  in  party 
conflicts,  and  kept  in  view  the  assistance  of  their  friends 
at  least  as  much  as  the  satisfaction  of  the  poetical  aspira- 
tions of  their  readers.  Glover's  hero  was  Leonidas,  the 
Spartan  king  who  sacrificed  himself  at  Thermopylae  to 
hold  in  check  the  Persian  invaders  of  Greece  ;  and  the 
grasping  tyrant  Xerxes  was  the  great  enemy  against 
whom  the  hero  had  to  contend.  But  Glover  the  poet 
was  an  ally  of  the  politicians  opposed  to  Sir  Robert 
Walpole,  and  one  of  the  accusations  against  this  Minister, 
urged  most  persistently  by  the  Opposition  to  drive  him 
from  power,  was  that  he  truckled  to  the  power  of  Spain, 
meekly  negotiating  and  compromising  British  interests 
when  a  true  patriot  would  have  had  recourse  to  war. 
Hence  when  Glover  wrote  in  denunciation  of  the  power 
of  Persia,  it  was  the  power  of  Spain  that  he  had  in  his 
mind's  eye  ;  and  when  he  eloquently  expounded  through 
Spartan  senators  the  true  duty  of  a  patriot,  the  readers 
were  expected  to  apply  this  as  an  argument  against  Sir 
Robert  Walpole.  "The  plan  and  purpose  of  'Leoni- 
das,' "  it  was  said,  "  is  to  show  the  superiority  of  freedom 
over  slavery,  and  how  much  virtue,  public  spirit,  and 
liberty  are  preferable  both  in  their  nature  and  effects  to 
riches,  luxury,  and  the  insolence  of  power."  Incidentally 
the  poet  found  opportunity  to  discuss  many  of  the  burn- 
ing questions — treatment  of  the  non-combatants  in  Avar, 
superiority  of  a  citizen  army  over  mercenaries.  "  Leoni- 
das "  had  thus  great  temporary  popularity.  Viewed 
simply  as  an  artistic  production,  its  great  novelty  was 
that,  although  professing  to  be  a  great  epic,  it  had  no 
supernatural  machinery.  "Never  was  an  epic  poem," 
Lord  Lyttelton  wrote,  "  which  had  so  near  a  relation  to 
common-sense.  He  has  neither  fighting  gods  nor  scold- 
ing goddesses  ;  neither  miracles  nor  enchantments  ; 
neither  monsters  nor  giants  in  his  work  ;  but  whatever 
human  nature  can  afford  that  is  most  astonishing,  mar- 
vellous, and  sublime."     The   metre   of   the   poem   was 


88  POETRY    BETWEEN    POPE    AND    COWPER 

blank  verse,  modelled  on  Thomson's.  But  in  the  labored 
descriptions  of  scenery  he  is  much  less  definite  in  his 
pictures  than  Thomson  ;  in  fact,  Glover's  descriptions 
show  all  the  faults  of  the  conventional  style  : 

"  The  plain  beyond  Thermopylae  is  girt 
Half  round  by  mountains,  half  by  Neptune  laved. 
The  arduous  ridge  is  broken  deep  in  clefts 
Which  open  channels  to  pellucid  streams 
In  rapid  flow  sonorous.     Chief  in  fame, 
Spercheos,  boasting  once  his  poplars  tall, 
Foams  down  a  stony  bed.     Throughout  the  fare 
Of  this  broad  champaign,  numberless  are  pitched 
Barbarian  tents.     Along  the  winding  flood 
To  rich  Thessalia's  confines  they  extend. 
They  fill  the  vallies,  late  profusely  blest 
In  Nature's  vary'd  beauties." 

Then  after  enumerating  the  shrubs,  flowerets,  ivy,  lawn, 
poplar  groves  torn  up,  cut  down,  trampled  by  the  bar- 
barian invaders,  he  goes  on  : 

"  Yet  unpolluted,  is  a  part  reserved 
In  this  deep  vale,  a  patrimonial  spot 
Of  Aleuadian  princes,  who,  allies 
To  Xerxes,  reigu'd  in  Thessaly.     There  glow 
Inviolate  the  shrubs.     There  branch  the  trees, 
Sons  of  the  forest.     Over  downy  moss, 
Smooth  walks  and  fragrant,  lucid  here  and  broad, 
There  clos'd  in  myrtle  under  woodbine  roofs, 
Wind  to  retreats  delectable,  to  grots, 
To  silvan  structures,  bow'rs,  and  cooling  dells 
Enliven'd  all  and  musical,  with  birds 
Of  vocal  sweetness,  in  relucent  plumes 
Innumerably  various.     Lulling  falls 
Of  liquid  crystal,  from  perennial  founts 
Attune  their  pebbled  channels." 

However  long  you  study  this  description,  you  will  not 
be  able  to  realize  any  landscape  that  was  definitely 
before  the  poet's  vision  when  he  wrote  ;  there  is  a  cer- 


"  LONDON,  OR  THE  PROGRESS  OF  COMMERCE  "    89 

tain  vague  framework  of  scenery,  but  when  the  poet 
comes  to  details,  he  puts  us  off  with  conventional  oft- 
repeated  phrases  for  natural  grandeurs  and  beauties — 
the  laving  Neptune,  arduous  ridges,  pellucid  and 
sonorous  streams,  winding  floods,  Nature's  varied 
beauties,  downy  moss,  retreats  delectable,  grots,  sylvan 
structure,  bowers,  and  cooling  dells.  The  poet,  in 
short,  only  gives  us  musical  phrases  for  what  the  senses 
find  in  nature,  thus  dressing  these  charms  to  advan- 
tage ;  there  is  nothing  in  his  landscapes  of  the  life  that 
the  human  imagination  in  moments  of  excitement  is 
apt  to  ascribe  to  the  face  of  Nature.  Read  the  Prologue 
to  act  iv.  of  "  Henry  V."  and  you  w7ill  understand  the 
difference. 

There  is  one  poem  of  Glover's, — "London,  or  the 
Progress  of  Commerce," — that  illustrates  the  fashion- 
able poetical  style  of  the  Queen  Anne  time — the  prev- 
alent idea  as  to  how  Nature  was  to  be  dressed  to 
advantage.  As  a  London  merchant,  Glover  no  doubt 
felt  his  heart  swell  within  him  as  he  looked  at  the 
bustle  of  many  nations  on  the  London  wharves,  and  saw 
ships  from  many  distant  regions  crowding  up  the 
Thames.  How  did  he  give  expression  to  this  exaltation 
of  mind  ?  He  could  not  present  the  coarse  and  vulgar 
details  of  trade  to  a  fine  Queen  Anne  gentleman  ;  he 
asks  his  reader  to  look  at  them  through  a  fine  allegorical 
veil,  transports  us  to  the  regions  of  mythology,  and 
gives  a  long  narrative  of  a  love  affair  between  the  sea- 
god  Neptune  and  the  nymph  named  Phoenice,  the 
guardian  spirit  of  the  Phoenicians.  The  beautiful 
nymph  Commerce  wras  the  offspring  of  this  Union. 
This  is  the  poet's  way  of  relating  the  prosaic  fact  that 
the  Phoenicians  were  the  first  great  traders  by  sea  ;  and 
the  events  in  the  subsequent  history  of  Commerce  are 
given  as  incidents  in  the  life  of  the  nymph  Commerce, 
from  her  cradle  and  nursery  till  the  time  when  she  fixed 
her  abode  in  Great  Britain. 


90       POETRY  BETWEEN  POPE  AND  COWPER 

Among  the  followers  of  Pope  in  Satire  there  is  only 
one  name  of  distinction,  Samuel  Johnson,  afterward 
the  great  prose  moralist,  critic,  and  lexicographer.  The 
critic  made  his  mark  in  literature  by  a  poem  ;  but  he  is 
one  of  the  exceptions  to  the  saying  that  the  critics  are 
the  men  who  have  failed  in  literature,  for  his  imitation 
of  Juvenal  was  a  success.  It  was  natural  that  Johnson 
should  choose  Juvenal  as  his  model  while  Pope  adopted 
the  style  of  Horace.  Horace  was  the  gay,  light-hearted 
satirist  of  the  foibles  of  the  literary  and  fashionable 
society  of  Rome  ;  whereas  Juvenal  took  a  more  stern 
and  gloomy  view  of  life,  lashed  the  vices  of  his  age  in 
a  spirit  of  moral  indignation,  contrasted  the  miseries  of 
the  poor  with  the  ostentatious  splendor  of  the  rich  in 
Roman  society,  and  denounced  heartlessness,  dishonesty, 
sycophancy, — all  the  vices  of  a  wealthy  and  showy 
civilization, — with  bitter  and  unsparing  scorn.  There 
was  nearly  as  much  difference  between  them  as  between 
Tom  Moore  and  Carlyle.  Pope,  himself  in  easy  circum- 
stances, and  the  friend  of  noblemen  and  statesmen, 
naturally  had  most  sympathy  with  Horace's  view  of 
life  ;  while  Johnson,  then  living  in  London,  as  Carlyle 
describes  him,  on  fourpence  halfpenny  a  day,  and  earn- 
ing a  precarious  livelihood  as  a  bookseller's  drudge,  as 
naturally  thought  of  Juvenal  as  a  model,  and  resolved 
to  apply  to  modern  circumstances  the  sarcasms  of  this 
satirist  on  the  Roman  metropolis. 

"  Slow  rises  worth  by  poverty  depressed," 

is  one  of  the  lines  in  Johnson's  "London."  He  had 
fitter  experience  of  the  fact  in  the  insolence  and  in- 
difference of  busy  emplo}Ters,  too  closely  occupied  with 
other  affairs  to  have  time,  if  they  had  had  the  insight, 
to  detect  his  great  talent.  As  far  as  versification  goes, 
Johnson  proved  himself  an  apt  pupil  of  Pope  ;  nobody 
since  has  equalled  him  in  combining  Pope's  terseness 
with  Pope's  smoothness.     And  in  one  respect  Johnson 


GRAY    AND    COLLINS  91 

even  might  be  said  to  have  surpassed  Pope,  if  Pope's 
object  had  been  merely  to  imitate  the  ancient  Roman. 
Johnson  is  at  more  pains  to  find  exact  modern  parallels 
to  the  ancient  situations,  and  is  always  felicitous  in  the 
turn  he  gives  to  Juvenal's  phrases.  But  the  truth  is 
that  he  went  to  work  rather  as  a  scholar  than  as  a 
satirist.  Indignation  at  the  vices  satirized  was  much 
less  a  motive  with  him  than  the  scholar's  ambition  to 
make  a  clever  adaptation  of  the  original.  Hence, 
although  his  "London"  attracted  some  attention,  and 
Pope,  always  generous  as  well  as  right  in  his  judg- 
ments of  genuine  literary  merit,  prophesied  that  the 
author  would  not  long  remain  unknown,  there  was  little 
real  vitality  in  the  poem.  It  was  really  an  imitation, 
owing  much  of  its  interest  to  the  original,  and  often 
appearing  destitute  of  motive  when  not  read  in  con- 
nection with  the  original.  Pope's  so-called  imitations, 
on  the  other  hand,  are  equally  interesting  to  the  reader 
whether  or  not  he  is  acquainted  with  Horace  ;  the 
reader  perhaps  may  get  additional  pleasure  from  observ- 
ing the  cleverness  of  the  parallel,  but  the  satire  has 
independent  point  and  relish.  There  is  more  of  John- 
son's genuine  sentiment  in  the  "Vanity  of  Human 
Wishes,"  another  imitation  of  Juvenal,  published  ten 
years  later. 

For  eminence  in  poetry,  novelty  and  distinction  are 
first  requisites  ;  and  during  Pope's  closing  years  the 
only  poets  that  began  to  show  capability  of  poetic  work 
that  should  be  at  once  distinctive  in  power  or  spirit  and 
high  in  quality  were  Gray  and  Collins.  The  great 
novelty  of  their  work  as  compared  with  Pope's  was  that 
it  was  lyrical  ;  they  wrote  mostly  in  that  form  of 
poetry  which  is  called  the  Ode. 

You  are  doubtless  familiar  with  some,  at  least,  of 
Gray's  poems.  You  all  know  the  "  Elegy."  But  the 
"  Elegy  "  was  not  the   work  on  which  he  most  prided 


92  POETRY    BETWEEN    POPE    AND    COWPER 

himself,  or  upon  which  he  would  have  desired  his  rank 
as  a  poet  to  be  adjudicated.  It  was  instantaneously, 
and  has  always  since  been,  popular,  but  he  considered 
that  the  popularity  was  due  to  the  subject  as  much  as 
to  the  art  of  the  poet.  The  "  Ode  on  the  Distant 
Prospect  of  Eton  College,"  the  "Hymn  on  Adversity," 
the  "Progress  of  Poesy,"  and  "The  Bard,"  were  li is 
masterpieces  in  point  of  artistic  construction.  It  may 
increase  your  interest  in  them  if  I  point  out  a  few 
respects  in  which  these  lyrics  differ  from  other  lyric 
poetry  in  our  language — i.  e.,  poetry  in  which  the  poet 
gives  expression  directly  to  emotion,  instead  of  describ- 
ing outward  nature,  or  narrating  events,  or  putting 
words  into  the  mouths  of  characters  whose  actions  are 
represented  on  the  stage. 

But,  perhaps,  I  had  better  speak  of  Collins  first,  as  he 
is  less  known,  and  there  is  one  poem  of  his  which  I  can 
confidently  recommend  to  you  as  certain  to  yield  }rou 
the  highest  delight,  if  you  take  the  trouble  to  master  its 
intricate  harmonies.  Of  his  life  there  is  little  to  be  told, 
and  that  little  is  painful.  Born  in  1721,  and  educated 
at  Oxford,  he  went  to  London  in  1744,  the  year  of  Pope's 
death,  as  a  literary  adventurer,  at  a  time  when  only  one 
man,  and  that  Pope,  had  succeeded  in  making  literature 
a  profitable  profession.  He  had  not  Johnson's  endur- 
ance, or  his  practical  talents  ;  a  youth — strange  phe- 
nomenon for  those  who  take  the  conventional  view  of  the 
eighteenth  century — of  fantastic  imagination,  with  not 
a  little  of  the  temperament  of  Shelley,  delighting,  as 
Johnson  puts  it,  "to  rove  through  the  meanders  of 
enchantment,  to  gaze  on  the  magnificence  of  golden 
palaces,  to  repose  by  the  waterfalls  of  Elysian  gardens." 
Two  years  before  he  went  up  to  London  he  had  pub- 
lished a  volume  of  poems,  "  Persian  Eclogues,"  Persian 
Pastorals,  reconciling,  as  you  will  observe,  the  taste  of 
the  time  for  pastorals  with  the  inclination  of  his  own 
fancy  toward  the  gorgeous  East.     For  such  a  man  the 


COLLINS  S    "  ODE    TO    EVENING  93 

booksellers  had  little  employment  ;  and  as  he  had  but 
scanty  means  of  subsistence  except  by  his  pen,  he  gave 
way  in  the  struggle  for  existence  ;  he  bore  up  for  a 
little  against  clouds  that  he  felt  to  be  gathering  on  his 
reason,  was  confined  for  some  time  in  a  madhouse,  and 
died,  at  the  age  of  thirty-nine,  in  the  year  of  Burns's 
birth,  1759. 

Collins  is  best  known  by  his  Ode  on  "  The  Passions," 
but  incomparably  his  finest  and  most  distinctive  work  is 
the  "  Ode  to  Evening."  The  superior  popularity  of 
"  The  Passions  "  is  easily  explained.  It  might  be  recited 
at  a  penny  reading,  and  every  line  of  its  strenuous 
rhetoric  would  tell  ;  every  touch  would  be  at  once 
appreciated.  But  the  beauties  of  the  "  Ode  to  Evening  " 
are  of  a  much  stronger  kind,  and  the  structure  of  it  is 
infinitely  more  complicated  : 

"  If  aught  of  oaten  stop,  or  pastoral  song, 
May  hope,  chaste  Eve,  to  soothe  thy  modest  ear, 
Like  thy  own  solemn  springs, 
Thy  springs,  and  dying  gales  ; 

"  Now  air  is  hush'd,  save  where  the  weak-ey'd  bat, 
With  short,  shrill  shriek  flits  by  on  leathern  wing, 
Or  when  the  beetle  winds 
His  small  but  sullen  horn, 

"  As  oft  he  rises  'midst  the  twilight  path, 
Against  the  pilgrim  borne  in  heedless  hum  : 
Now  teach  me,  maid  compos'd, 
To  breathe  some  softened  strain, 

"  Whose  numbers  stealing  through  thy  darkening  vale, 
May  not  unseemly  with  its  stillness  suit, 
As  musing  slow,  I  hail 
Thy  genial  lov'd  return  ! 

"  While  Spring  shall  pour  his  showers,  as  oft  he  wont, 
And  bathe  by  breathing  tresses,  meekest  Eve  ! 
While  Summer  loves  to  sport 
Beneath  thy  lingering  light  : 


94  POETRY   BETWEEN    POPE    AND    COWPER 

"  While  sallow  Autumn  fills  thy  lap  with  leaves, 
Or  Winter,  yelling  through  the  troublous  air, 
Affrights  thy  shrinking  train, 
And  rudely  rends  thy  robes  : 

"  So  long,  regardful  of  thy  quiet  rule, 
Shall  Fancy,  Friendship,  Science,  smiling  Peace, 
Thy  gentlest  influence  own, 
And  love  thy  favourite  name  ! " 

It  gains  nothing  from  being  read  aloud.  It  is  a  poem  to 
be  taken  into  the  mind  slowly  ;  you  cannot  take  posses- 
sion of  it  without  effort.  Give  a  quiet  evening  to  it  ; 
return  to  it  again  and  again  ;  master  the  meaning  of  it 
deliberately  part  by  part,  and  let  the  whole  sink  into 
your  mind  softly  and  gradually,  and  you  will  not  regret 
the  labor.  You  will  find  yourselves  in  possession  of  a 
perpetual  delight,  of  a  music  that  will  make  the  fall 
of  evening  forever  charming  to  you.  Difficulty  is  not 
necessarily  a  virtue  in  a  poem,  but  neither  is  it  neces- 
sarily a  defect.  The  poet  who  fixes  a  rare  and  evan- 
escent mood  in  harmonious  rhythm  and  imagery,  thus 
making  it  a  permanent  possibility  for  the  human  race, 
cannot  always  build  his  new  and  delightful  home  for 
the  imagination  out  of  common  materials,  and  the  work- 
manship with  which  he  adorns  it  may  be  curious  and 
intricate.  Such  a  pleasure-house  is  often  built  up  by 
abstruse  workings  of  the  imagination,  in  regions  far 
above  the  prosaic  level,  and  the  spirit  must  shake  off  its 
natural  slothfulness  before  it  can  rise  with  the  poet  and 
enter  into  and  take  possession  of  the  home  that  he  has 
made  for  it. 

A  distinction  has  been  drawn  between  the  poet  and 
the  orator.  The  poet,  it  has  been  said,  is  essentially  an 
egotist,  expressing  what  he  feels  without  caring  how  it 
may  affect  others  ;  whereas  the  orator  is  essentially  a 
sympathetic  man,  always  considering  the  effect  of  his 
expression  upon  others  ;  striving  to  look  at  what  he  says 


COLLINS    AND   GRAY    COMPARED  95 

from  their  point  of  view,  or,  as  Mr.  Gladstone  once  put 
it,  receiving  from  his  audience  in  a  vapor  what  he  gives 
back  to  them  in  a  flood.  I  confess  that  I  don't  attach 
much  value  to  such  distinctions.  They  are  always  half 
truths.  Nearly  every  thing  that  has  been  said  by  poets 
in  the  way  of  general  truth  about  poetry  is  not  even 
quarter  truth,  because  each  puts  his  own  practice  as  if 
it  were  a  universal  rule.  All  poets  express  their  own 
emotions,  more  or  less,  and  all  poets  are  more  or  less 
influenced  by  their  audience.  Still  the  degree  in  which 
they  are  self-centred,  or  liable  to  be  disturbed  by  out- 
side influence,  constitutes  a  marked  difference  in 
character,  and,  properly  qualified,  this  distinction  be- 
tween the  poet  and  the  orator  serves  to  illustrate  the 
difference  between  Collins  and  Gray.  It  is  this  differ- 
ence that  Mr.  Swinburne  has  in  his  mind  when  he  says 
that,  "  as  a  lyric  poet,  Gray  is  unworthy  to  sit  at  the 
feet  of  Collins,"  and  that  "  there  was  but  one  man  in 
the  time  of  Collins  who  had  in  him  a  note  of  pure  lyric 
song,  a  pulse  of  inborn  music  irresistible  and  indubita- 
ble " — namely,  Collins  himself.  Comparatively  speak- 
ing, Collins  sang  to  gratify  his  own  feelings,  beginning 
when  the  impulse  was  on  him,  and  leaving  off  when  he 
was  satisfied  ;  Gray  considered  in  what  mood  his  song 
would  find  his  audience,  how  he  could  seize  their  atten- 
tion, how  sustain  and  increase  it,  and  how  leave  them 
deeply  impressed  at  the  end.  Gray,  in  short,  wrote 
with  a  deliberate  eye  to  the  effect  to  be  produced  on  his 
reader. 

Even  in  the  "  Elegy,"  which  reads  like  a  spontaneous 
outburst  of  feeling,  this  is  apparent  if  you  look  at  the 
construction  of  it.  You  will  find  a  regular  symmetrical 
division  in  it,  an  arrangement  of  facts  such  that  the 
reader,  though  he  passes  fi*om  one  train  of  thought  to 
another,  is  not  kept  too  long  in  one  mood,  not  wearied 
by  reflections  in  the  same  vein.  The  variety  is  studied 
and    carefully    proportioned.     Gray    deliberately  sup- 


96  POETRY    BETWEEN    POPE    AND    COWPEK 

pressed  one  stanza,  because  to  have  put  it  in  would  have 
made  too  long  a  parenthesis  : 

"  There  scattered  oft,  the  earliest  of  the  year, 

By  hands  unseen  are  show'rs  of  violets  found  ; 
The  redbreast  loves  to  build  and  warble  there, 
And  little  footsteps  lightly  print  the  ground." 

The  stanza  is  beautiful  in  itself  ;  some  have  gone  so  far 
as  to  say  that  it  contains  purer  poetry  than  any  of  the 
stanzas  that  were  retained  ;  but  Gray  decided  that  it 
would  be  out  of  proportion,  and  sacrificed  it. 

In  the  "  Eton  College,"  again,  the  change  from 
emotion  to  emotion,  the  balance  of  the  parts,  the 
pathetic  humor  of  the  conclusion,  which  recalls  and  binds 
together  and  suffuses  the  whole,  must  strike  every-body 
who  reflects  for  a  moment  on  the  construction  of  the 
poem.  The  effect  of  the  whole,  and  of  each  part  as 
contributing  to  the  whole,  has  been  elaborately  calcu- 
lated, elaborately,  and  yet  with  such  vividness  of  emo- 
tional insight  that  there  is  no  trace  of  labor.  Stanza 
follows  stanza  as  if  by  spontaneous  growth,  and  the  con- 
cluding reflection  arises  as  if  by  irresistible  suggestion. 

It  has  been  made  a  point  of  distinction  between  Gray 
and  the  lyric  poets  of  this  century,  Wordsworth  and 
Byron  more  particularly,  that  in  their  lyrics  they 
express  purely  personal  emotion,  feelings  peculiar  to 
themselves.  They  take  us  into  confidence,  as  it  were, 
about  their  own  concerns,  and  invite  our  sympathy, 
which  we  cannot  give  unless  we  sympathize  with  their 
characters.  Gray,  on  the  other  hand,  suppresses  himself, 
and  strives  to  interpret  emotions  that  all  men  must  feel 
in  presence  of  the  subject  of  his  verse.  This  is  certainly 
true  of  the  "Elegy  "and  the  "Ode  on  Eton  College." 
These  are  not  expressions  of  individual  feeling,  like 
Byron's  "  Farewell  to  England,"  or  some  of  Words- 
worth's "Solitary  Reaper";  they  express  melanchoty 
and  humorous   reflections   common   to   all  mankind,  as 


JOHNSON    CONTRASTED    WITH    GRAY  97 

common  as  the  fact  of  death  and  the  heedless  enjc^ment 
of  the  present  by  the  young. 

But  it  is  dangerous  to  generalize  about  poets.  The 
emotions  to  which  lyrical  expression  is  given  in  the 
"  Progress  of  Poesy  "  and  the  "  Bard  "  are  as  purely 
individual  as  the  most  singular  of  Wordsworth's  medi- 
tations on  rustic  life.  Johnson's  criticisms  of  these 
wonderful  wonders  of  wonders,  as  he  called  them,  are 
savage  and  unsparing.  Sometimes  this  is  attributed  to 
personal  jealousy.  It  is  a  superficial  view,  and  unjust  to 
the  great  critic.  It  is  true  that  Johnson  manifests  a 
good-humored  contempt  for  Graj^'s  character.  We  can 
easily  understand  this  when  Ave  consider  the  circum- 
stances of  the  two  men.  Gray  was  a  Fellow  of  a  College 
in  Cambridge,  precise,  finicking,  and  reserved  in  manner. 
The  dignified  little  man  had  few  intimates  ;  lie  was 
a  great  reader,  a  scholar  of  marvellously  wide  range, 
reputed  the  most  learned  man  in  Europe.  But,  as 
Johnson  saw  and  said,  he  did  very  little  with  his  learn- 
ing. Five  or  six  poems  was  not  a  great  result  of  so 
much  reading.  We  can  easily  understand  that  the 
indefatigable  producer  under  difficulties,  the  sturdy, 
strenuous,  companionable  giant  of  Bolt  Court,  Fleet 
Street, — a  very  different  locality  from  Peterhouse,  Cam- 
bridge,— would  have  little  sympathy  with  such  a  man. 
Beneath  Gray's  reserved  exterior  there  was  great  depth 
of  feeling  ;  and  with  all  his  minute  scholarship  he  was 
a  man  of  large  and  comprehensive  views.  Constitutional 
melancholy  and  self-distrust  seem  to  have  been  the 
secrets  of  his  small  amount  of  production.  But  this 
was  not  known  fully  to  the  world  till  after  his  death. 
He  never  spoke  out  during  his  life.  Any  apparent 
injustice  done  him  by  Johnson  was  due  to  a  want  of 
knowledge  that  was  not  possible  to  Johnson  when  he 
wrote.  And  as  regards  the  Odes,  we  can  understand 
Johnson's  want  of  sympathy  without  ascribing  any  part 
of  it  to  personal  jealousy.     They  appeal  really  to  scholars 


98  POETRY    BETWEEN    POPE    AND    COWPEE 

and  historians.  The  Greek  motto  fixed  to  the  "  Progress 
of  Poesy  "  signifies  that  they  are  vocal  only  to  the 
initiated.  There  is  not  a  line  that  is  not  charged  with 
a  historical  allusion.  So  marvellous  is  the  rhythm  that 
single  stanzas  may  be  read  with  delight ;  but  the  signifi- 
cance of  the  whole  demands  study.  The  substance  of 
them  is  a  series  of  ecstatic  visions  of  historical  events  ; 
of  the  personal  emotions  felt  by  a  historian  who  was 
also  a  man  of  feeling  and  imagination.  The  "Bard  "  is 
full  of  alliteration  and  personification,  and  exemplifies 
the  rhetoric  of  Gray.  There  is  a  quick  transition  when 
the  Bard  foretells  the  accession  of  the  House  of  Tudor 
and  the  glory  of  Elizabeth  : 

"  '  But  oh  !  what  solemn  scenes  on  Snowdon's  height 
Descending  slow  their  glitt'ring  skirts  unroll  ? 
Visions  of  glory,  spare  my  aching  sight, 
Ye  unborn  Ages,  crowd  not  on  my  soul  ! 
No  more  our  long  lost  Arthur  we  bewail. 
All  hail,  ye  genuine  Kings,  Britannia's  Issue,  hail  ! ' 
'  In  the  midst  a  Form  divine  ; 
Her  lyon-port,  her  awe-commanding  face, 
Attempered  sweet  to  virgin-grace. 
What  strings  symphonious  tremble  in  the  air, 
What  strains  of  vocal  transport  round  her  play  ! 
Hear  from  the  grave,  great  Taliessin,  hear  ; 
They  breathe  a  soul  to  animate  thy  clay. 
Bright  Rapture  calls,  and  soaring,  as  she  sings, 
Waves  in  the  eye  of  Heav'n  her  many-colour'd  wings."' 


CHAPTER  VIII 

DECLINE    OF   POETRY — THE   NOVEL 

WALPOLE'S  CRITICISM — WHY  THE  "WANT  OF  POETRY  WAS  NOT 
FELT — DIARY  OF  A  LADY  OF  QUALITY — RISE  OF  THE  NOVEL — 
"  PAMELA  " — CONNECTION  WITH  MAGAZINE  LITERATURE — 
FIELDING — HISTORICAL  NOVELS — "  THE  CASTLE   OF    OTRANTO  " 

I  gave  some  account  in  my  last  lecture  of  the  great 
poets  of  the  middle  part  of  the  eighteenth  century. 
Why  there  was  such  a  scarcity  of  good  poetry  during 
that  period  is  a  question  that  admits  of  great  diversity 
of  opinion  ;  that  there  was  a  scarcity  of  it  is  a  matter 
of  fact,  and  it  was  felt  at  the  time.  In  this,  as  in  most 
other  social  facts,  there  were  probably  several  causes  at 
work.  One  of  these  causes  is  very  plainly  hinted  at 
in  a  contemporary  letter  by  a  very  shrewd  observer, 
Horace  Walpole,  second  son  of  the  great  Prime  Min- 
ister. Writing  to  his  friend  Sir  Horace  Mann  in  1742, 
he  said  :  "  If  you  did  amuse  yourself  with  writing 
any  thing  in  poetry,  you  know  how  pleased  I  should  be 
to  see  it,  but  for  encouraging  you  to  it,  d'ye  see,  'tis  an 
age  most  unpoetical  !  'Tis  even  a  test  of  wit  to  dislike 
poetry  ;  and  though  Pope  has  half  a  dozen  old  friends 
that  he  has  preserved  from  the  taste  of  last  century,  yet 
I  assure  you  the  generality  of  readers  are  more  diverted 
with  any  paltry  prose  answer  to  old  Marlborough's 
secret  history  of  Queen  Mary's  robes.  I  do  not  think 
an  author  would  be  universally  commended  for  any 
production  in  verse,  unless  it  were  an  ode  to  the  Secret 
Committee,  with  rhymes  of  liberty  and  property,  nation 
and  administration." 

This  is  in  effect  to  say  that,  in  the  opinion  of  Horace 

99 


100  DECLINE    OF   POETEY 

Walpole,  fashionable  society  was  too  much    occupied 
with  politics  to  have  any  interest  to  spare  for  poetry. 
To  understand  how  this  was  possible  we  must  remember 
that  political  power  was  then  confined  to  a  very  narrow 
circle.     It  was  not,  as  you  are  aware,  till  nearly  a  cen- 
tury afterward   that  the  middle  classes,  the  commercial 
classes,   obtained    a   share  of  political  influence.     The 
men  who  had  any  chance  of  a  voice  in  the  management 
of  the  affairs  of  the  nation  were  the  men  whose  wives 
and  daughters- constituted  polite  society  in  the   metrop- 
olis— "  the    town,"   as   they   called    themselves.      And 
intrigues  were  incessantly  going  on  to  keep  Ministers 
on  or  put  Ministers  out,  in  all  of  which  the  wives  and 
daughters   took    a   keen   interest.      The    affairs  of  the 
State  were  the  affairs  of  the  town,  and  had  an  exclusive 
absorbing   and   personal    interest   that  they  no  longer 
possess  for  any  single  section   of  the   commuity  now. 
Hence  the  literature  that  had  most  direct  interest  for 
the   town    was  political,  and   a  damaging  attack  on  a 
Minister,  a  piece  of  scandal  or  argument,  whether  in 
prose  or  in  verse,  was  apt  to  eclipse  any  production  that 
depended  for  its  effect  on  the  interest  peculiar  to  poetry. 
The  absorbing  interest  in   politics  among  those  who 
were  at  the  time  the  chief  patrons,  promoters,  and  con- 
sumers of  literature  was  probably  one  of  the  causes  of 
the  poetic  barrenness  of  the  middle  of  the  eighteenth 
century.     This  political  interest  was  fed  and  nourished 
by  the  press  with  a  regular  supply,  weekty,  bi-weekly, 
and  daily. 

Among  the  other  things  that  may  be  mentioned  as 
taking  the  place  of  poetry  among  the  enjoyments  of  a 
life  of  leisure  at  this  time  is  the  stage.  Queen  Anne 
and  her  Ministers  exerted  themselves  to  purify  and 
reform  the  stage.  Under  Charles  II.  ladies  went  to  the 
theatre  masked,  and  things  were  spoken  that  were  not 
very  fit  for  them  to  hear.  Queen  Anne  prohibited  the 
wearing  of  masks,  and  instituted  a  moral  censorship  of 


DIARY    OF    A    LADY    OF   QUALITY  101 

plays,  insisting  that  every  thing  intended  for  public  per- 
formance should  first  be  submitted  to  the  Lord  Chamber- 
lain. That  official  was  not  so  particular  as  he  is  now,  but 
there  was  a  marked  improvement  in  the  morality  of  plays. 
The  theatre  took  a  more  important  place  among  fashion- 
able amusements.  It  has  not,  I  think,  been  remarked 
that  the  dreariest  period  in  the  poetic  annals  of  the 
eighteenth  century  is  almost  exactly  coincident  with  the 
career  of  David  Garrick.  You  will  see  how  a  powerful 
counter-attraction  at  the  theatre,  such  as  would  occupy 
the  serious  attention  of  intellectually  disposed  people, 
would  diminish  the  demand  for  poetry,  and  rob  the  poet 
of  that  devoted  s\rmpathy  in  the  absence  of  which  he 
cannot  work  with  full  power,  if  you  consider  for  a  little 
how  people  of  leisure  at  that  time  distributed  their  day. 
There  is  an  amusing  paper  in  the  Spectator,  No.  323, 
which  professes  to  give  the  diary  of  a  lady  of  quality. 
It  is,  of  course,  a  caricature,  but  it  gives  us  an  idea  of  the 
arrangement  of  a  fashionable  day,  of  the  hours  that  were 
kept  by  fashionable  people  : 

"  From  three  to  four. — Dined.  Mrs.  Kitty  called  upon  me  to  go 
to  the  Opera  before  I  was  risen  from  table. 

"  From  dinner  to  six. — Drank  tea.  Turned  off  a  footman  for 
being  rude  to  Veny. 

"  Six  o'clock. — Went  to  the  Opera.  I  did  not  see  Mr.  Froth  till 
the  beginning  of  the  second  act.  Mr.  Froth  talked  to  a  gentle- 
man in  a  black  wig.  Bowed  to  a  lady  in  the  front  box.  Mr. 
Froth  and  his  friend  clapped  Nicolini  in  the  third  act.  Mr. 
Froth  cried  out  Ancora.  Mr.  Froth  led  me  to  my  chair.  I  think 
he  squeezed  my  hand. 

"  Eleven  at  night. — Went  to  bed.  Melancholy  dreams.  Me- 
thought  Nicolini  said  he  was  Mr.  Froth." 

The  morning  was  spent  in  reading,  if  there  was  any 
thing  to  read,  playing  with  pets,  seeing  to  the  dress- 
maker, shopping,  going  to  church,  the  mid-day  service  at 
St.  Paul's,  where  the  music  was  good,  being  especially 
fashionable.     Half-past  two  or   three   was  the  dinner- 

LIBRARY 
UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA 


«*  t«  f!»*-i  ('■wr*  P" 


102  THE    NOVEL 

hour.  After  dinner  was  the  time  for  making  calls  or 
walking  in  the  Mall;  and  in  the  evening  there  were 
public  entertainments  and  private  assemblies.  There 
was  probably  then  a  greater  separation  than  exists  now 
in  the  social  amusements  of  men  and  women  ;  after 
dinner  the  men  went  to  the  coffee-houses  if  they  did  not 
go  to  the  play,  and  the  women  went  to  tea-parties,  where 
throughout  the  greater  part  of  the  century  card-playing 
was  the  chief  alternative  to  scandal  and  other  small  talk. 
The  theatres  opened  at  five  o'clock,  and  the  entertain- 
ment lasted  till  nine.  You  will  thus  see  that  the  theatre 
filled  an  important  gap  in  the  day  ;  and  that,  when  it 
was  the  rage,  it  was  likely  to  absorb  not  a  little  of 
fashionable  interest.  Under  Garrick  revivals  of  Shakes- 
pearian plays  were  the  great  theatrical  events  ;  earlier 
in  the  century,  revivals  of  Dryden.  The  morning  was 
the  chief  time  for  reading.  Addison's  lady  of  quality 
on  two  of  her  mornings  read  Dryden's  "  Aurengzebe,  or 
the  Indian  Emperor "  ;  if  she  had  lived  thirty  years 
later,  she  would  probably  have  sj>ent  the  same  time  over 
Shakespeare.  Can  you  wonder  that  such  solemn  pon- 
derosities as  Johnson's  "  London  "  or  "Vanity  of  Human 
Wishes,"  or  such  intricate  harmonies  and  sublimities  as 
Collins's  "Ode  to  Evening"  or  Gray's  "Progress  of 
Poesy,"  failed  to  arrest  general  attention  when  the 
vacant  hours  of  the  morning  could  be  spent  in  reading 
the  thrilling  scenes  of  "  Richard  III."  or  "  Othello,"  and 
the  evening  in  seeing  Shakespeare's  heroes  imperson- 
ated by  the  most  original  modern  actors?  The  town 
naturally  yielded  to  the  greatest  attraction,  and  there 
was  no  body  of  readers  outside  this  fashionable  society 
in  whose  sympathy  the  poet  might  find  nourishment. 

Two  kinds  of  literature,  then,  imperatively  claimed  a 
portion  of  the  hours  available  for  reading  in  the  reigns 
of  the  first  Georges — political  journals  and  plays. 
People  in  society  were  bound  to  read  these,  because  they 
were  talked  about  ;  and  not  to  know  them  or  appear  to 


EICHAEDSON's    "  PAMELA  "  103 

know  them  was  to  have  nothing  to  say,  or  no  grace  in 
listening.  And  there  was  a  third  kind  which  became 
prominent  in  the  second  ten  years  of  George  II. 's  reign, 
about  the  time  when  Pope  published  the  last  of  his 
Satires.  This  was  the  novel.  New  forms  of  literature, 
as  I  have  before  said,  always  have  the  advantage  in 
freshness  and  force  of  interest  over  old  forms.  The 
novel  appeared  in  a  new  form  with  Richardson's 
"  Pamela"  in  1740.  About  the  time  when  Horace  Wal- 
pole  wrote  the  letter  from  which  I  quoted  at  the  begin- 
ning of  the  lecture,  ladies  at  Ranelagh  Gardens,  then 
one  of  the  fashionable  resorts,  were  holding  up  to  each 
other  their  copies  of  "  Pamela,"  to  show  that  they  had 
in  their  possession  the  most  popular  book  of  the  day. 
The  industrious  antiquarian  has  cast  doubt  upon  the 
literal  truth  of  this  story,  pointing  out  that  Ranelagh 
Gardens  were  not  opened  to  the  public  till  eighteen 
months  after  "Pamela  "  had  begun  to  run  through  many 
editions.  Vauxhall,  however,  was  open,  if  Ranelagh 
was  not,  and  the  incident  may  have  been  observed  there. 
At  any  rate,  the  fact  expressed  by  the  story  is  true 
enough,  that  "  Pamela  "  was  at  once  and  universally 
popular.  In  January,  1741,  the  editor  of  the  Gentle- 
marts  Magazine  wrote  as  follows  :  "  Several  en- 
comiums on  a  series  of  Familiar  Letters,  published  but 
last  month,  entitled  '  Pamela,  or  Virtue  Rewarded,' 
came  too  late  for  this  Magazine,  and  we  believe  there 
will  be  little  occasion  for  inserting  them  in  our  next ; 
because  a  Second  Edition  will  then  come  out  to  supply 
the  Demands  of  the  Country,  it  being  judged  in  town  as 
great  a  sign  of  want  of  curiosity  not  to  have  read 
1  Pamela '  as  not  to  have  seen  the  French  and  Italian 
dancers."  This  testimony  is  almost  as  quaint  and 
significant  as  the  stor}r  about  Ranelagh  Gardens.  Books 
must  be  new  in  form  as  well  as  in  substance  before  they 
create  such  a  furore  as  that  indicates.  There  has  been 
nothing   like    it    in   my   time.     The    nearest   approach 


104  THE    NOVEL 

I  recollect  is  J.  R.  Green's  "Short  English  History." 
Fashionable  ladies  carried  it  about  with  them  on  their 
visits  to  country-houses. 

Richardson  has  long  received  the  honor  of  being  re- 
garded as  the  founder  of  the  English  Novel,  but  of  late  it 
has  been  customary  to  go  a  little  farther  back,  and  trace 
the  beginnings  of  the  novel  in  the  papers  by  Addison  and 
Steele  in  the  Tatler  and  the  Spectator.  The  novel,  it  is 
said,  was  developed,  not  created,  by  Richardson.  Now, 
this  is  hardly  fair  to  the  ingenious  printer,  if  it  is  meant 
to  deny  him  the  credit  of  having  invented  or  stumbled 
upon  a  new  species  of  composition — the  novel  of 
manners,  stories  in  which  the  characters  are  drawn  from 
ordinary  domestic  life,  and  of  which  the  interest  lies  in 
picturing  how  they  affect  one  another  and  how  they  are 
affected  by  circumstances.  It  is  true  that  the  novel  was 
developed,  and  not  created  ;  but  it  is  not  more  true  of 
Richardson's  novel  than  of  any  other  new  species  of 
composition,  such  as  Marlowe's  tragedy,  or  Scott's 
romantic  tale,  or  Byron's  personal  epic.  All  alike  are 
developed,  not  created,  in  the  sense  of  having  many 
affinities  with  the  kind  of  literature  immediately  anterior 
to  them.  Thus  in  the  novel  of  manners  there  are  two 
elements — there  is  a  description  of  ordinary  character, 
and  there  is  plot-interest — i.  e.,  there  is  a  story.  Both 
of  these  elements  are  found  in  the  generation  before 
Richardson,  but  not  in  combination.  It  was  he  that 
combined  them  in  his  novel  of  manners,  and  therefore 
is  he  entitled  to  the  praise  of  having  invented  a  new 
species  of  composition. 

You  will  find  abundant  descriptions  of  manners  in 
the  Sp>ectator,  and  many  delicate  studies  of  character. 
Whoever  wishes  to  get  a  living  knowledge  of  the  Queen 
Anne  time  must  give  evenings  to  the  Spectator,  and 
observe  the  incidents  that  are  pictured  as  occurring  in 
the  shops  and  the  streets  and  the  places  of  amusement, 
at  balls  and  tea-tables  and  dinner-tables,  and  the  private 


THE    "  SPECTATOR'S  "    CORRESPONDENTS  105 

sanctuaries  where  fine  ladies  issue  adorned  for  conquest. 
The  quiet  Spectator  penetrated  everywhere.  Especially 
in  the  letters  from  fictitious  correspondents, — from 
Jenny  Simper,  Aurelia  Careless,  Betty  Cross-stitch, 
Constantine  Comb-brush,  Florinda,  Corinna  Jeraminta, 
Jack  Courtly,  Toby  Rentfree,  Will  Cymon,  Dick  Love- 
sick, and  so  forth, — you  will  find  many  happy  studies  of 
manner  and  character,  many  of  the  touches  of  nature 
that  make  all  the  world  kin.  But  there  is  no  story  to 
weave  the  detached  studies  together.  We  learn  how 
Jenny  Simper — being,  as  she  described  herself,  a  young 
woman  with  her  fortune  to  make — went  to  church,  and 
was  much  aggrieved  because  the  clerk  of  the  parish,  an 
ex-gardener,  wreathed  the  pews  so  thickly  with  ever- 
greens that  she  could  not  make  eyes  at  the  desirable 
baronet  during  the  service  ;  but  it  had  not  occurred  to 
any  body  to  make  a  heroine  out  of  Jenny  Simper,  or  a 
hero  out  of  the  baronet,  or  a  story  out  of  incidents 
within  the  probabilities  of  ordinary  life.  There  were 
stories  to  read  in  the  days  of  Queen  Anne  ;  there  have 
been  stories  from  the  very  beginning  of  literature  ;  but 
they  were  of  a  different  kind  from  the  stories  told  in 
novels  of  manners.  There  were,  in  the  first  place,  the 
great  long-winded  romances,  full  of  amazing  adventures, 
heroes  of  superhuman  strength  and  courage  and  gener- 
osity, and  heroines  of  surpassing  beauty  and  constancy. 
The  sceptical  spirit  had  banished  them  from  polite 
society  in  town,  but  they  still  lingered  in  the  country 
and  in  the  less  enlightened  strata  of  middle-class  life, 
and,  on  the  whole,  perhaps  did  good  with  all  their 
unreality,  through  their  high  standard  of  ideal  conduct. 
There  were  stories  of  another  kind,  stories  of  fashionable 
intrigue,  to  which  the  name  of  novel  was  sometimes 
given — stories  that  served  no  good  purpose.  Finally, — 
though  this  was  not  in  the  reign  of  Queen  Anne,  but  in 
the  reign  of  her  successor,  George  I., — there  came  the 
novels  of  adventure  and  crime — the  invention  of  Defoe. 


106  THE    NOVEL 

Richardson  did  not  invent  stories  any  more  than  he 
invented  the  description  of  manners,  but  that  does  not 
in  the  least  detract  from  the  originality  of  his  invention 
of  the  domestic  novel — a  story  of  incidents  all  within 
the  area  of  possible  occurrences  in  every-day  life.  The 
idea  of  writing  such  a  story  came  to  him  by  accident. 
He  was  an  industrious  and  prosperous  printer — a  stout, 
rosy,  vain,  prosy  little  man,  not  at  all  the  sort  of  man 
that  might  be  expected  to  be  a  fashionable  novelist. 
Of  poor  parentage,  he  had  been  apprenticed  to  a  London 
printer  ;  had  spent  some  years  as  a  press-reader  or  proof- 
corrector — not  a  bad  position  for  acquiring  a  knowledge 
of  literature  ;  had  married  his  master's  daughter,  and 
acquired  an  extensive  business.  When  he  was  near  the 
age  of  fifty,  some  bookseller  friends  of  his,  struck,  per- 
haps, by  his  excellence  as  a  letter-writer,  had  suggested 
to  him  that  he  should  compose  a  "  familiar  letter- 
writer  " — "  a  little  volume  of  letters  in  a  common  style, 
on  such  subjects  as  might  be  of  use  to  those  country 
readers  who  were  unable  to  indite  for  themselves."  In 
his  youth,  as  it  happened,  Richardson  had  had  a  singular 
experience  in  the  way  of  writing  letters  for  others. 
Three  young  women  who  could  not  write  had  employed 
him,  when  he  was  a  boy  of  thirteen,  to  conduct  their 
correspondence  with  their  sweethearts,  which  he  did, 
he  tells  us,  much  to  the  satisfaction  of  his  employers,  and 
without  betraying  their  confidence.  This  may  have 
been  known  to  the  booksellers  who  suggested  his  writ- 
ing a  volume  of  model  correspondence.  At  any  rate,  he 
undertook  the  task.  But,  having  a  genius  for  story-tell- 
ing, it  occurred  to  him,  as  he  turned  the  project  over  in 
his  mind,  that  he  might  tell  a  story  in  a  series  of  letters, 
which  would  serve  equally  well  as  models  for  letter- 
writing,  and  at  the  same  time  cultivate  the  principles  of 
virtue  and  religion  in  the  minds  of  the  youth  of  both 
sexes.  Accordingly,  he  chose  a  country  girl,  Pamela,  in 
the  service  of  a  young  squire,  Mr.  R.,  and  made  her 


THE    ORIGIN    OF    "  PAMELA  "  107 

relate  in  letters  to  her  friends  her  experiences  from  day 
to  day  and  week  to  week  in  very  trying  circumstances. 
Friends  write  to  advise  Pamela  in  her  difficulties,  and 
so  the  story  is  carried  on  with  most  circumstantial 
minuteness,  Pamela  describing  with  the  most  careful 
exactness  every  particular  of  what  happens  to  her,  and 
adding  her  own  reflections,  surmises,  and  appeals  for 
approbation  and  advice.  The  effect  of  this  method  is 
that,  if  you  have  any  sympathy  with  the  heroine,  you 
get  intensely  interested  in  her  perplexities  ;  the  very 
fulness  of  the  details,  and  the  close  truth  to  nature  with 
which  the  novelist  follows  every  turn  in  the  girl's 
thoughts,  compel  you  to  read  on.  No  one  can  read  over 
a  few  scenes  from  Richardson  without  feeling  that  he  is 
a  master  of  his  art ;  but  few  people  now,  I  imagine,  read 
any  of  his  novels  through.  It  was  otherwise  in  his  own 
generation,  when  readers  had  more  in  common  with  the 
thoughts  and  sentiments  of  his  voluminous  descriptive 
letter-writers.  The  fame  of  "  Pamela"  made  Richard- 
son a  great  personal  favorite,  especially  with  ladies. 
Several  ladies  of  quality  made  a  pet  of  him,  deluged  him 
with  confidences,  and  urged  him  to  write  more  ;  and 
under  their  flattering  encouragement  he  produced 
"  Clarissa  Harlowe,"  a  model  of  every  virtue  in  higher 
life,  and  "  Sir  Charles  Grandison,"  his  ideal  of  a  perfect 
gentleman.  "  Clarissa  "  is  universally  acknowledged  to 
be  his  masterpiece.  An  anecdote  was  given  by  Macaulay 
which  shows  how  entrancing  the  story  may  become  to 
l-eaders  once  fairly  caught  by  the  current  of  it.  He 
took  the  whole  eight  volumes  with  him  when  he  was  in 
India  to  a  hill-station  during  the  hot  season,  and  lent 
the  first  volume  to  the  Governor's  wife.  She  read  it 
and  lent  it  to  the  Governor's  secretary,  and  went  to 
Macaulay  for  the  second.  Thus  the  whole  eight  volumes 
passed  from  hand  to  hand,  and  for  a  wreek  or  more  the 
whole   station    was  in  a  ferment  over  the  fortunes  of 

Clarissa,  the  readers  anxiously  waiting  their  turn  for  the 
11 


108  THE    NOVEL 

successive  volumes.  Richardson  is  long-winded  and 
prolix  to  a  degree,  but  that,  in  spite  of  all  his  faults  of 
style,  he  had  the  art  of  interesting  his  own  generation 
was  abundantly  proved,  and  apparently  his  greatest 
novel  is  still  capable  in  favorable  circumstances  of  exert- 
ing its  spell. 

A  much  more  brilliant  writer,  though  a  less  minute 
anatomist  of  ebbs  and  flows  and  cross-currents  of  feel- 
ing, was  Richardson's  great  successor  and  caricaturist, 
Henry  Fielding.  Two  men  more  unlike  than  these  two 
pioneers  of  the  modern  novel  could  not  be  conceived. 
Richardson's  experiences  were  all  of  business  life  and 
quiet  domestic  life.  In  his  voluminous  correspondence 
with  lady  friends  after  his  sudden  leap  into  fame,  which 
seems  not  to  have  disturbed  in  the  least  the  even  tenor 
of  his  habits,  we  have  minute  pictures  of  the  circum- 
stances in  which  he  wrote  his  books — sometimes  in  his 
back  shop  in  Fleet  Street,  sometimes  in  an  arbor  in  his 
garden  at  Hammersmith,  reading  what  he  had  written 
to  the  young  ladies  of  his  family,  talking  Avith  them 
over  his  characters,  judging  from  their  criticisms  as  the 
story  went  on  whether  he  had  produced  the  effects 
intended.  Fielding  was  a  much  less  domesticated 
character — a  high-spirited,  mirth-loving  roisterer,  the 
son  of  a  younger  son  of  a  noble  family,  who,  when  his 
scanty  allowance  ran  short,  or  was  not  paid  at  all,  tried 
to  subsist  by  writing  for  the  stage  and  the  journals, 
organized  a  company  of  his  own,  started  more  than  one 
journal  of  his  own,  married  a  wife  and  spent  her  small 
fortune  in  a  year  or  two,  read  for  the  bar,  and  obtained 
an  appointment  as  a  police-magistrate,  never  contriving 
to  make  both  ends  meet,  yet  never  losing  his  cheerfulness 
or  his  generous  temper.  With  all  his  wit  and  keen 
powers  of  observation  Fielding  was  probably  too  much 
hurried  and  pressed  with  the  cares  and  enjoyments  of 
his  happy-go-lucky  life  from  day  to  day  to  be  capable 


RICHARDSON   AND   FIELDING    CONTRASTED  109 

of  striking  out  a  new  path  in  literature  ;  and  it  was  by 
an  accident  that  he  fell  into  the  track  of  the  humble 
tradesman-like  printer,  and  then  discovered  a  rich  field 
for  his  genius.  When  "  Pamela  "  became  the  rage,  there 
was  much  in  the  sentiment  of  it  that  appealed  to  Field- 
ing's sense  of  the  ludicrous,  and  he  resolved  to  write  a 
parody.  Beginning  in  this  spirit,  he  wTrote  a  few 
chapters,  more  eminent  for  wit  than  for  delicacy,  and 
then  practically  abandoned  the  design  of  burlesquing 
Richardson,  and  went  on  to  describe  life  as  he  had  seen 
it  in  the  course  of  his  varied  experience,  and  characters 
as  they  presented  themselves  to  his  own  mind  and  heart. 
The  life  that  he  described  was  not  always  the  highest  in 
point  of  morality,  and  his  characters  were  not  always 
spotless  ;  but  there  is  this  to  be  said  for  him  as  a 
moralist,  that  he  threw  no  sentimental  halo  over  vice, 
that  he  honored  true  worth  in  manhood  and  in  woman- 
hood, that  his  Parson  Adams,  his  Squire  All  worthy,  and 
his  Amelia  are  among  the  most  lovable  characters  in 
fiction,  and  that  no  satirist  ever  exposed  meanness, 
hypocrisy,  and  kindred  vices  with  healthier  scorn  and 
ridicule.  Apart  from  the  substance  of  his  work,  his 
method  was  very  different  from  Richardson's.  He 
discarded  the  epistolary  way  of  telling  his  story.  The 
comic  epic  was  his  model.  Hence  Byron  called  him  the 
"prose  Homer  of  human  nature."  And  he  does  not 
leave  his  characters  to  reveal  themselves,  as  the  so-called 
dramatic  novelist  does, — as  Dickens  does,  for  example, — 
in  what  they  do  and  say.  He  makes  a  running  commen- 
tary on  their  conduct  as  he  goes  along  ;  button-holing 
you,  as  Thackeray  puts  it,  while  he  conducts  you  through 
his  picture-gallery,  and  discoursing  familiarly  about  the 
creatures  of  his  imagination. 

I  cannot  here  enter  upon  an  elaborate  criticism  of 
Richardson  and  Fielding.  I  wish  only  to  show  you  their 
places  in  literature  as  the  originators  of  a  new  species 
of  composition,  which,  while  it  was  fresh  and  new,  and 


110  THE   NOVEL 

practised  by  masters  of  tlieir  art,  helped  to  push  poetry- 
out  of  a  foremost  place  in  the  minds  of  the  reading 
public.  I  would  recommend  you  to  read  what  is  said 
about  Fielding  by  Thackeray  in  his  "Lectures  on  the 
Humorists,"  and  by  Mrs.  Oliphant  on  Richardson.  I 
will  not  dwell  upon  the  immediate  successors  of  these 
pioneers,  Smollett,  Sterne,  and  Goldsmith,  but  pass  on 
to  a  novel  of  a  new  kind,  produced  twent}r-five  years 
after  Richardson's  "Pamela,"  Horace  Walpole's  "  Castle 
of  Otranto." 

It  would  almost  seem  as  if,  after  twenty  years  of  the 
new  kind  of  fiction  inaugurated  by  Richardson,  includ- 
ing the  masterpieces  of  Fielding  and  Smollett  and 
Sterne,  the  literary  appetite  began  to  pine  for  something 
new,  and  to  hark  back  to  the  old  fare  of  supernatural 
romance.  You  must  not  suppose  that  the  old-fashioned 
stories  were  at  once  extinguished  by  the  new  style  ;  they 
were  only  pushed  into  the  background,  relegated,  per- 
haps, to  a  less  fastidious  class  of  readers.  If  you  look  at 
the  lists  of  published  books  in  old  numbers  of  the 
Gentleman' 's  Magazine,  you  will  see  that  publishers 
still  found  readers  for  scandalous  stories,  for  romances 
such  as  the  "  Adventures  of  Telemachus,"  and  for  more 
or  less  fictitious  biographies  of  eminent  criminals.  But 
it  was  only  novels  of  the  new  kind  that  made  a  con- 
spicuous mark  among  readers  in  the  height  of  literary 
fashion — till  the  "Castle  of  Otranto"  appeared,  which 
was  professedly  an  attempt  to  combine  the  supernatural 
incidents  of  the  old  romance  with  the  truth  to  nature  in 
dialogue  and  character  introduced  by  the  new  novel. 

It  was  Horace  Walpole's  opinion  that  in  the  novels 
of  every-day  life  Nature  had  cramped  Imagination. 
There  had  been  plenty  of  invention,  but  it  was  inven- 
tion of  scenes  such  as  might  occur  in  common  life  ;  the 
novelists  had  excluded  themselves  from  the  great 
resources  of  fancy.  He  thought  that,  for  the  sake  of 
greater  variety,  the  fancy  should  be  left  free  to  "  roam 


THE    "CASTLE    OF    OTRANTO  "  111 

through  the  boundless  realms  of  invention,"  and  thus 
have  an  opportunity  of  creating  more  interesting  situa- 
tions. But  he  freely  admitted  that  it  would  never  do 
to  go  back  to  the  condition  of  the  old  romances,  in 
which  every  thing  was  unnatural,  in  which  not  only  the 
incidents  were  improbable,  but  the  conduct  of  the  per- 
sonages in  the  face  of  those  incidents  fantastic,  their 
language  absurdly  inflated,  their  sentiments  preposter- 
ous. He  proposed,  therefore,  a  compromise  between 
the  two.  He  was  to  have  liberty  to  defy  the  rules  of 
probability  in  the  incidents,  but  he  was  to  bind  himself 
to  adhere  to  probability  in  what  he  made  his  characters 
feel  and  say  and  do  in  the  improbable  emergencies. 
Their  lot  was  to  be  cast  in  a  land  of  wonders,  of  strange 
apparitions,  and  miraculous  occurrences,  but  they  were 
to  comport  themselves  as  human  beings  might  be  ex- 
pected to  do  in  the  circumstances. 

Constructed  deliberately  on  this  plan,  the  "  Castle  of 
Otranto  "  founded  a  new  school  of  fiction.  It  is  called 
a  Gothic  Romance,  and  the  scene  is  laid  in  a  Gothic 
castle,  with  a  labyrinth  of  vaulted  passages  beneath  it, 
one  of  which,  by  a  trap-door,  communicates  with  a 
church  in  the  neighborhood.  Manfred,  the  Prince  of 
Otranto,  is  the  central  figure  in  the  story,  a  bold  and 
unscrupulous  man,  though  not  without  redeeming 
traits  in  his  character.  The  title  to  the  principality  has 
been  in  his  family  for  only  two  generations  before  him, 
and  the  title  of  his  grandfather  was  more  than  doubtful. 
The  last  prince  of  the  rightful  line  was  Alfonso  the 
Good,  who  died  in  the  Holy  Land  ;  the  Marquis  of 
Vicenza  was  the  nearest  heir,  but  Manfred's  grand- 
father had  forestalled  him,  and  was  powerful  enough 
to  keep  him  out  of  his  own.  There  was  a  mysterious 
prophecy  that  Manfred's  line  would  keep  possession 
till  the  house  had  become  too  small  for  its  rightful 
owner.  Now,  naturally  there  was  one  point  about 
which  Manfred  had  a  morbid  anxiety — the  perserva- 


J  12  THE    NOVEL 

tion  of  his  line.  His  wife  Hippolyte  had  borne  him 
but  two  children,  a  boy  and  a  girl.  The  boy  was  a 
puny,  sickly  child,  but  Manfred  determined  to  marry 
him  to  the  only  daughter  of  the  rival  claimant,  the 
Marquis  of  Vicenza.  He  obtained  this  Lady  Isabella 
from  her  guardians  during  her  father's  absence  in  the 
Holy  Land,  and  the  supernatural  part  of  the  story 
begins  with  the  preparations  for  the  wedding.  The 
wedding  party  is  assembled  in  the  chapel  of  the  castle, 
when,  to  Manfred's  intense  impatience,  it  is  discovered 
that  the  boy-bridegroom, — he  was  only  fifteen, — is  miss- 
ing. A  servant  is  sent  in  haste  to  his  apartments  on 
the  other  side  of  the  court.  The  servant  returns  star- 
ing, speechless,  and  foaming  at  the  mouth.  Manfred 
and  his  retainers  rush  into  the  court,  and  find  the  poor 
boy  mangled  and  bleeding,  crushed  to  death  by  a 
gigantic  helmet  of  black  steel  with  huge  black  plumes. 
The  helmet  is  a  hundred  times  as  big  as  any  ever  made 
for  mortal  man,  and  the  plumes  are  in  proportion,  and 
seemed  to  filled  the  court-yard  as  with  a  black  forest. 
Manfred  is  astounded,  but  in  the  depth  of  his  grief  and 
wonder  he  has  presence  of  mind  enough  to  say  :  "Take 
care  of  the  Lady  Isabella" — for  a  purpose  which 
appears  presently.  Nobody  can  tell  where  the  helmet 
has  come  from,  but  in  the  midst  of  their  conjectures 
a  young  peasant  remarks  that  it  is  exactly  like  in  every 
respect  but  size  to  the  helmet  on  the  head  of  the  black 
marble  statue  of  Alfonso  the  Good  in  the  church. 
Manfred  flies  into  a  passion.  Some  of  the  servants 
rush  to  the  church,  and  find  that  the  helmet  from 
Alfonso's  statue  is  gone.  The  cry  is  raised  that  the 
young  peasant,  who  is  a  stranger  in  the  place,  is  a 
necromancer,  and  that  it  is  he  who,  by  his  black  art, 
has  compassed  the  death  of  the  young  prince.  Manfred 
orders  him  to  be  confined  in  the  helmet,  to  starve  to 
death  unless  his  familiars  supply  him  with  food.  Then 
Manfred    proceeds    to    carry  out  a    suddenly  formed 


THE    "CASTLE    OF    OTRANTO  113 

resolution.  The  supernatural  thwarting  of  his  purpose 
has  maddened  him.  He  will  divorce  his  wife  and 
marry  Isabella  himself.  He  sends  for  Isabella  and 
broaches  his  design  to  her.  She  is  horrified.  He  lays 
hands  on  her.  Then  the  plumes  on  the  helmet  outside 
in  the  court-yard  are  violently  agitated,  and  rustle 
against  the  window,  accompanied  by  a  low,  hollow 
sound.  "  See,"  Isabella  cries,  "  Heaven  itself  declares 
against  your  wicked  purpose  ! "  "  Heaven  nor  Hell 
shall  prevent  me  !  "  he  says.  At  this  instant  one  of  the 
pictures  on  the  wall,  the  portrait  of  his  grandfather, 
heaves  a  deep  sigh,  and  presently  walks  out  of  its  frame 
on  to  the  floor. 

These  examples  will  give  you  some  idea  of  how  Wal- 
pole  effected  his  proposed  reconciliation  of  reality  and 
romance.  The  only  real  importance  of  his  work  is  that 
it  marks  a  new  point  of  departure  from  the  novel  as 
conceived  by  Richardson  and  Fielding. 


CHAPTER  IX 
the  novel — continued 

INFLUENCE  OF  PERCY'S   "  RELIQUES  "   AND  OSSIAN — MISS  BURNEY 
AND  THE   LADY  NOVELISTS 

At  the  close  of  last  lecture  I  mentioned  that  Wal- 
pole's  "  Castle  of  Otranto  "  founded  a  new  school  of 
novels,  the  novels  of  supernatural  incident.  It  was  also 
the  first  to  direct  the  attention  of  novelists  to  the  great 
wealth  of  materials  for  their  craft  that  might  be  found 
in  feudal  times,  lawless,  turbulent  characters,  unbridled 
passions,  and  picturesque  costume  and  architecture. 
The  very  year  after  the  "  Castle  of  Otranto "  was 
published  there  appeared  what  I  take  to  be  our  first 
Historical  Romance,  "  Longsword,  Earl  of  Salisbury." 
I  only  know  the  work  from  the  description  of  it  in  the 
Monthly  Review  of  the  time, — I  have  never  been  able  to 
get  sight  of  the  book  itself.  It  is  never  mentioned  in 
our  literary  histories,  as  far  as  I  know.  According  to 
the  Monthly  JZevieivy  it  made  an  attempt  to  follow 
historical  truth  ;  "  the  truth  of  history  was  artfully 
interwoven  with  entertaining  fictions  and  interesting 
episodes."  This  could  not  be  said  of  the  "  Castle  of 
Otranto,"  which,  although  the  scene  was  laid  in  feudal 
times,  had  no  basis  in  actual  historical  fact.  "Long- 
sword," then,  seems  to  have  been  the  first  anticipa- 
tion in  species,  if  not  in  quality,  of  Scott's  historical 
romances. 

But,  indeed,  it  would  give  a  wrong  impression  of  the 
way  in  which  the  public  mind  is  gradually  prepared  for 
the  reception  of  a  writer  of  genius,  and  the  atmosphere 
created  in  which  he  finds  vital  sustenance,  to  ascribe  the 

114 


INFLUENCE    OF   PERCYS    "  BELIQUES  115 

initiative  in  any  new  kind  of  writing  absolutely  to  one 
man  or  one  work.  I  remarked  in  my  last  lecture  on  the 
injustice  of  denying  to  Richardson  the  praise  of  invent- 
ing the  modern  English  novel  of  manners.  I  pointed 
out  at  the  same  time  how  he  had  predecessors  in  one 
essential  feature  of  this  new  literary  form.  But  it  is 
possible  that,  owing  to  the  emphasis  I  was  obliged  to 
lay  on  his  originality,  I  induced  you  to  think  of  him  as 
standing  out  more  prominently  from  his  compeers  and 
predecessors,  more  sharply  marked  off  from  his  age, 
than  he  really  was.  The  individual  is  great  in  literature, 
but  he  does  not  create  out  of  nothing  ;  the  soil  is  pre- 
pared for  him,  and  the  materials  gradually  accumulated 
which  he  seizes  upon  and  turns  to  new  shapes.  Indi- 
viduals take  new  departures,  take  the  lead  in  new  expedi- 
tions into  the  untried  and  unexplored  ;  but  the  ways 
and  means  for  the  expeditions  are  first  accumulated  by 
the  co-operation  of  many.  Thus  the  "  Castle  of  Otranto  " 
and  "  Longsword  "  were  new  departures  ;  but  about  the 
time  when  they  were  made  there  was  a  general  harking 
back  to  the  customs  and  the  literature  of  the  Middle 
Ages.  A  year  after  the  publication  of  Walpole's  romance, 
1765,  Bishop  Percy  published  his  famous  "  Reliques  of 
Ancient  English  Poetry "  ;  and,  a  few  years  before, 
Macpherson  had  produced  first  his  "Fragments"  of 
ancient  Gaelic  poetry,  and  then  his  pretended  translation 
of  the  Ossianic  epics,  "  Fingal  "  and  "  Temora."  The 
study  of  mediaeval  antiquity  was  in  fact  becoming  a  very 
general  pursuit  among  the  learned  when  Walpole  took 
the  lead  in  introducing  the  sentiment  of  it  into  prose 
fiction. 

It  was  some  years  before  Walpole  had  an  eminent 
successor  in  his  own  peculiar  walk  of  romance,  flavored 
with  supernatural  or  quasi-supernatural  incident.  The 
next  conspicuous  romance  of  this  species  was  Mrs. 
Radcliffe's  "  Mysteries  of  Udolpho,"  published  nearly 
thirty  years  later.      Meantime,  in  1778,  a  conspicuous 


116  THE    NOVEL 

mark  was  made  by  a  novel  in  the  Richardson  school  of 
domestic  fiction,  a  novel  that  arrested  and  sustained 
universal  attention  in  the  literary  world  amidst  the 
crowd  of  writings  that  poured  from  the  press.  This 
was  Miss  Burney's  "  Evelina,"  and  it  was  the  first  of  a 
long  series  of  triumphs  for  the  sex  in  this  branch  of 
literature.  In  the  fifty-five  years  between  Sterne's 
"  Tristram  Shandy  "  and  Scott's  "  Waverley  "  the  chief 
honors  in  novel-writing  were  carried  off  by  women — 
Miss  Burney,  Mrs.  Radcliffe,  Miss  Edgeworth,  and  Miss 
Austen.  The  names  that  became  classic  during  this 
interval  were  all  names  of  women. 

Miss  Burney  was  the  first  woman  to  achieve  first-rate 
distinction  in  the  modern  novel,  thirty-eight  years  after 
Richardson  had  led  the  way  into  the  new  form.     But 
you  are  not  to  suppose  that  during    that  long  period 
women  had  abstained  from  trying  a  kind  of  writing  for 
which  women  have  such  special  qualifications  in  their 
keen  eye  for  manners,  their  quick  sense  of  the  ridiculous, 
and  sharp  insight  into  character.     Very  soon  after  the 
invention  of  the  novel  circulating  libraries  were  also 
invented  ;  novel-reading  became  a  passion,  and  novel- 
writing  one  of  the  few  money-making  branches  of  lit- 
erature.    As   early   as    1752   the    Monthly   Review,   a 
monthly    organ    of   literary   criticism    started  in  1748, 
complained   of  the   labor  of  reading  the  multitude  of 
novels  submitted  to  its  judgment.     They  spring  up  like 
mushrooms  every  year,  every  work  of  merit  producing 
a  swarm  of  imitators.     In   1755  a  witty  writer  in  the 
Connoisseur  proposed  to  establish  a  literary  factory, 
and,  of  course,  the  manufacture  of  novels  was  to  be  a 
prominent  part  of  the  business,  an  eminent  cutter-out 
being  retained  for  the  plot  and  leading  adventures,  with 
numerous  assistants   competent   to  fill  in   details.     To 
supply  the  eager  needs  of  the  circulating  library  many 
translations  were  also  made  from  the  French,  the  novels 
of  Marivaux  and  Mme.  Riccoboni  being  special  favor- 


mrs.  lennox's  "female  quixote  "  117 

ites.  Such  being  the  demand  for  novels,  as  soon  as 
this  delightful  form  of  literature  was  invented,  women 
were  well  to  the  front  both  as  translators  and  as  origi- 
nal authors.  There  was  Mrs.  Charlotte  Lennox,  for 
example,  a  lady  with  a  literary  career  of  nearly  half 
a  century,  which  began  very  prosperously  but  ended 
rather  unhappily,  the  old  lady,  who  for  so  long  had 
supported  herself  by  miscellaneous  work  with  her  pen, 
being  under  the  necessity  of  writing  after  her  powers 
had  fallen  off.  She  was  one  of  the  great  Johnson's 
favorites,  and  the  success  of  her  first  novel,  "  Harriet 
Stuart,"  in  1751,  was  celebrated  by  a  supper  at  the  Devil 
Tavern,  where  the  mighty  "  Rambler  "  crowned  her  with 
laurel.  Her  next  work,  the  "  Female  Quixote,"  in  1752, 
was  a  still  greater  success.  It  certainly  is  a  very  amusing 
book.  It  describes  the  adventures  of  a  beautiful  young 
lady  whose  father,  a  powerful  Minister,  having  retired 
from  the  world  in  disgust  at  his  fall  from  office,  kept  her 
in  complete  seclusion  in  the  country.  Here  the  young 
lady,  finding  a  complete  collection  of  the  fantastic 
romances  to  which  I  have  referred  as  being  fashionable 
in  Queen  Anne's  time,  accepts  in  all  seriousness  their 
ideals  of  heroism  and  love  and  the  proper  behavior  of 
lovers,  models  her  lonely  life  with  her  maids  after  the 
fashion  of  the  romantic  heroines,  and  keeps  her  mind 
constantly  occupied  with  expectations  of  romantic  ad- 
ventures. Encountering  a  stranger  in  one  of  her  rides, 
she  takes  him  for  a  desperate  lover  come  to  carry  her 
off  by  force,  and  behaves  as  romantic  princesses  do  in 
such  circumstances,  orders  her  servants  to  secure  and 
disarm  the  unfortunate  man,  and  treats  his  protests  as 
signs  of  villanous  duplicity.  She  takes  one  of  her 
father's  gardeners  for  a  prince  in  disguise,  and  is  hardly 
disabused  of  her  fancy  when  the  young  man  is  cudgelled 
by  the  head  gardener  and  dismissed,  being  caught  in 
the  act  of  stealing  carp  from  a  fish-pond.  Her  father 
wishes  to  marry  her  to  a  cousin,  whom  he  invites  to  his 


118  THE    NOVEL 

castle  to  make  her  acquaintance  with  this  object  ;  but 
she  is  deeply  offended  with  the  young  man  because  he 
does  not  make  love  in  the  high-flown  manner  of  ro- 
mantic chivalry,  and,  instead  of  serving  her  faithfully 
and  humbly  for  several  years  before  with  faltering 
voice  and  devout  reverence  he  begs  the  unutterable 
favor  of  kissing  her  hand,  blurts  out  a  declaration 
of  love  after  a  few  weeks'  acquaintance.  As  you  may 
suppose,  man}'-  capital  situations  occur  before  Arabella 
is  enlightened  as  to  the  difference  between  the  ways  of 
real  life  and  the  ways  of  seventeenth-century  romance. 
The  story  is  rather  wire-drawn,  but  full  of  humor. 
Johnson  continued  a  friend  to  the  authoress  to  the  last, 
and  wrote  proposals  for  printing  a  quarto  edition  of  her 
works  in  1775  ;  and  it  would  seem  that,  Avith  all  her 
various  literary  industry,  Mrs.  Lennox  needed  such  ser- 
vices as  old  age  came  upon  her.  She  would  seem  to 
have  been  not  particularly  amiable  in  private  life,  if 
we  are  to  believe  Mrs.  Th rale's  judgment  (recorded  in 
Mme.  D'Arblay's  "  Diary  "),  that  every -body  admired 
Mrs.  Lennox,  but  nobody  liked  her.  Miss  Fielding,  the 
sister  of  the  novelist,  also  wrote  several  novels,  and  in 
the  opinion  of  Richardson,  who  was  not  a  little  jealous 
and  spiteful  toward  his  rival  and  caricaturist,  showed  a 
more  intimate  knowledge  of  the  human  heart  than  her 
(gifted)  brother.  This  was  not  the  general  opinion, 
though  an  admirer  wrote  of  her  that  "  Miss  Fielding 
was  one  of  those  truly  estimable  writers  whose  fame 
smells  sweet,  and  will  do  so  to  late  posterit}r,  one  who 
never  wrote 

'  One  line  which  dying  she  would  wish  to  blot,'  " 

a  compliment  that  could  hardly  be  paid  to  Henry 
Fielding. 

Another  female  novel-writer,  whose  fame  has  been 
kept  green  by  the  fame  of  her  children  and  her  great- 
grandchildren, was  Mrs.  Frances  Sheridan,  the  authoress 


MRS.    FRANCES    SHERIDAN  119 

of  "  Sydney  Biddulph "  and  "  Nourjahad,"  and  the 
mother  of  Richard  Brinsley  Sheridan.  In  the  opinion 
of  Charles  James  Fox,  "  Sydney  Biddulph  "  was  the 
best  of  modern  novels,  and  Johnson  Avept  over  it,  and 
complimented  the  authoress  by  telling  her  that  he 
doubted  whether  "  on  moral  principles  she  had  a  right 
to  make  her  readers  suffer  so  much."  It  is  a  curious 
circumstance  that  precisely  the  same  complaint  of  carry- 
ing the  sufferings  of  a  heroine  to  an  intensely  painful 
pitch,  harrowing  the  reader  with  continuous  and  unre- 
lieved and  undeserved  distresses,  might  be  brought 
against  more  than  one  of  the  powerful  novels  of  her 
great-granddanghter,  the  Hon.  Mrs.  Norton,  especially 
against  "Stuart  of  Dunleath."  The  "Memoirs  of 
Sydney  Biddulph  "  appeared  in  1761,  and  Mrs.  Sheri- 
dan was  undoubtedly  the  most  eminent  female  novelist 
before  Miss  Burney  ;  although,  according  to  Mrs.  Bar- 
bauld,  Mrs.  Brooke,  another  indefatigable  novelist  and 
translator,  whose  "  Lady  Julia  Mandeville  "  was  repub- 
lished in  Mrs.  Barbauld's  collection,  was  the  "  first 
female  novel-writer  who  attained  a  perfect  purity  and 
polish  of  style." 

You  will  see,  then,  that  women  had  not  been  idle  in 
the  new  field  of  literature  before  Miss  Burney  produced 
her  "  Evelina,"  though  this  lady  was  the  first  to  take 
rank  with  the  masters  of  the  art.  "  She,"  says  Macaulay, 
"first  showed  that  a  tale  might  be  written  in  which 
both  the  fashionable  and  vulgar  life  of  London  might 
be  exhibited  with  great  force  and  with  broad  comic 
humor,  and  which  yet  should  not  contain  a  single  line 
inconsistent  with  rigid  moralit}',  or  even  with  virgin 
delicacy.  She  took  away  the  reproach  which  lay  on  a 
most  useful  and  delightful  species  of  composition.  She 
vindicated  the  right  of  her  sex  to  an  equal  share  in  a 
fair  and  noble  province  of  letters."  This  is  true  in  the 
main,  as  is  generally  the  case  with  Macaulay's  broad 
and  vigorous  rhetoric,  only  it  is  a  trifle  exaggerated. 


120  THE    NOVEL 

All  the  female  novelists  that  I  have  mentioned  were 
unexceptionable  in  point  of  morality,  as  much  so  as 
Miss  Burney.  Macaulay  was  probably  thinking  of  the 
female  novelists  of  a  much  earlier  period  when  he  praised 
Miss  Burney  for  her  delicacy — of  Mrs.  Behn  and  Mrs. 
Manley  and  Mrs.  Haywood.  There  is  no  lack  of  purity 
in  the  "Female  Quixote,"  and  "Sydney  Biddulph " 
Avould  compare  favorably  in  this  respect  with  Victorian 
novelists.  And  for  more  than  thirty  years  before  the 
appearance  of  "Evelina"  her  sex  had  taken  an  equal 
share  with  men  in  novel-writing,  at  least  in  point  of 
quantity.  It  was  the  masterly  natural  freshness  of  the 
character-drawing,  the  clear,  unencumbered  vivacity  of 
the  incidents,  the  frankness  of  the  humor, — in  a  word, 
the  originality,  the  absence  of  literary  artificialit}', — 
that  signalized  "  Evelina "  as  a  work  of  genius,  and 
set  every-body  talking  about  the  new  writer.  Miss 
Burney  was  not  the  first  woman  novelist,  but  she  was 
the  first  with  a  distinct  vein  of  her  own  who  wrote 
with  her  eyes  on  the  subject,  and  not  on  any  estab- 
lished model  of  approved  style.  Macaulay  is  more 
exact  when  he  speaks  of  the  great  force  and  broad 
comic  humor  with  which  Miss  Burney  depicted  vulgar 
as  well  as  fashionable  life.  It  was  the  picture  of  vulgar 
life, — life  in  a  would-be  fashionable  tradesman's  family, 
— that  specially  attracted  notice  in  an  age  when  the 
fashionable  world  had  been  described  to  death  in  hun- 
dreds of  periodical  essays  and  novels.  We  happen  to 
have  preserved  for  us  a  good  deal  of  the  talk  that  went 
on  about  "Evelina"  in  the  first  months  after  its  appear- 
ance when  it  was  all  the  rage.  Miss  Burney  published 
it  anonymously,  not  even  her  own  father  knowing  who 
was  the  author  ;  and  she  recorded  in  her  diary,  which 
is  almost  as  delightful  as  her  novels,  what  she  heard 
people  saying  about  the  book  and  its  characters.  It 
was  the  vulgar  characters  that  were  particularly  com- 
mented on  and  admired.     The  position  of  the  heroine 


CHARACTER-DRAWING    IN    "  EVELINA  121 

Evelina  was  such  as,  to  bring  her  in  contact  with  various 
classes.  Her  origin  was  mysterious,  but  she  had  been 
brought  up  by  a  clergyman  in  the  country,  and  when 
she  was  seventeen,  she  was  brought  out  in  London 
society  by  a  lady  who  knew  her  mother's  history. 
Thus  in  the  first  part  of  the  story  we  have  descrip- 
tions of  the  rustic  beauty's  experiences  at  a  ball,  an 
opera,  a  ridotto,  a  visit  to  the  Ranelagh  Gardens, 
a  visit  to  the  Pantheon.  The  girl's  timidity,  the 
scrapes  she  falls  into  in  consequence,  and  her  encoun- 
ters with  an  empty  fop,  an  enamoured  but  unscrupulous 
baronet,  and  an  accomplished,  noble-minded,  high-bred 
lord,  who,  of  course,  eventually  marries  the  heroine, 
are  described  in  a  vein  of  the  most  exquisite  comedy. 
In  Lord  Orville  Miss  Burney  succeeded  in  drawing 
what  Richardson  attempted  in  Sir  Charles  Grandison 
— a  perfect  gentleman,  who  is  at  the  same  time  not  the 
least  of  a  prig.  Evelina's  ignorance  and  timidity  get 
her  into  scrapes,  but  these  are  nothing  to  the  troubles 
caused  by  a  terrible  relation  on  the  mother's  side,  a 
vulgar  Frenchwoman,  her  grandmother,  lime.  Duval, 
who  very  soon  turns  up.  The  scenes  between  this  most 
amusing  harridan  and  her  friend's  husband,  Captain 
Mirvan,  a  salt  of  the  oldest  school,  are  boisterously 
farcical.  The  old  tar  hates  the  French,  and,  conceiving 
a  violent  animosity  against  Mine.  Duval,  makes  it  his 
chief  amusement  to  draw  the  old  hag,  as  he  puts  it, 
putting  her  into  violent  passions,  insulting  her  in  every 
way  imaginable,  devising  practical  jokes  at  her  expense. 
One  of  these,  in  which  he  and  the  baronet,  who  for 
interested  reasons  is  his  ally,  disguise  themselves  as 
highwaymen,  drag  her  roughly  from  her  carriage,  and 
leave  her  with  her  legs  tied  in  a  ditch,  first  tearing 
off  her  false  hair,  has  uncomfortable  consequences  for 
Evelina,  for  her  grandmother  insists  upon  taking  pos- 
session of  her,  and  carries  her  off  to  the  society  of  cer- 
tain poor  relations  in  the  city.     The  Braughton  family 


122  THE    NOVEL 

and  their  lodger,  Mr.  Smith,  were  the  great  hit  of  the 
book.  Mr.  Braughton,  the  father,  was  a  silversmith  in 
Snowhill,  a  close-fisted,  money-making  tradesman,  but 
his  girls  were  quite  fine  ladies,  and  their  radiant  vul- 
garities, their  squabbles  with  their  rude  brother  Tom, 
their  contempt  for  their  country  cousin  Evelina,  their 
respect  for  the  great  Mr.  Smith,  made  excellent  sport 
for  the  fashionable  readers  of  Miss  Burney's  novel.  It 
amused  them  vastly  to  see  all  the  foibles  and  artificial 
distinctions  of  polite  society  travestied  by  these  lower 
animals.  There  is  Mr.  Smith,  in  particular,  the  first- 
floor  lodger,  a  city  clerk  with  an  immense  conceit  of 
superiority  to  the  vulgar  herd  round  him,  a  sort  of 
pinchbeck  master,  who  patronized  Evelina  and  intro- 
duced her  to  all  the  glories  of  a  Ilampstead  ball,  where 
Mine.  Duval,  the  French  grandmother,  danced  a  minuet, 
to  the  grinning  admiration  of  all  beholders.  Mr.  Smith, 
in  the  fine  tambour  waistcoat  of  which  he  was  so  self- 
conscious,  was  the  delight  of  Miss  Burney's  readers. 
"  The  Holborn  beau  for  my  money,"  laughed  Dr.  John- 
son to  Miss  Burney  ;  "  O  you  sly  rogue,  you  character- 
monger."  The  adventures  of  Evelina  with  the  Brauffh- 
tons  are  conceived  in  the  spirit  of  the  liveliest  farcical 
invention.  When  Miss  Burney  comes  to  her  third 
volume  and  the  unravelling  of  her  plot,  which  contains 
not  a  few  ingenious  surprises,  she  becomes  more  con- 
ventional and  sentimental,  but  nothing  could  be  better 
than  the  freshness  of  incident  and  humorous  character- 
drawing  of  the  first  two  volumes.  It  says  something 
for  the  humanity  of  the  time  that  Captain  Mirvan  was 
generally  considered  to  have  gone  too  far  in  his  baiting 
of  the  old  Frenchwoman  Mine.  Duval  and  the  silly  fop 
Mr.  Lovel.  This  should  be  remembered  when  a  certain 
episode  in  the  third  volume  is  quoted  as  an  example  of 
the  brutality  of  manners  among  the  upper  classes.  Two 
young  men  of  the  period  staying  at  a  fashionable  country- 
house,  in  their  passion  for  betting,  get  up  a  race  of  a 


miss  burney's  early  associations  123 

hundred  yards  between  two  poor  old  women  who  can, 
hardly  walk,  and  when  one  of  the  hobbling  old  thinsrs 
falls  and  hurts  herself  so  badly  that  she  can  do  no  more, 
her  backer  swears  at  her  and  urges  her  on  with  unfeeling 
cruelty,  the  whole  company  standing  by  to  enjoy  the 
fun.  We  should  bear  in  mind  that  such  conduct  was 
as  abhorrent  to  the  general  sentiment  of  Miss  Burney's 
time  as  it  is  to  the  general  sentiment  of  our  own  time. 
It  was  not  upon  such  incidents  that  the  popularity  of 
Miss  Burney's  "Evelina"  was  founded. 

It  was  a  matter  of  wonder  to  Miss  Burney's  contempo- 
raries how  a  writer  who  showed  such  an  intimate  knowl- 
edge of  high  life  could  at  the  same  time  have  acquired 
the  knowledge  of  vulgar  middle-class  life  shown  in  her 
portraits  of  the  Braughton  family.  The  explanation 
lay  in  the  peculiar  position  of  the  authoress's  father. 
She  was  the  daughter  of  Dr.  Burney,  a  man  of  consider- 
able celebrity  in  his  time,  an  intimate  of  the  Johnson 
and  Reynolds  circle,  author  of  a  "  History  of  Music," 
and  the  most  fashionable  music-master  of  his  genera- 
tion. His  high  place  in  his  profession  made  him  a  man 
of  note  in  Continental  schools  of  music,  and  foreign 
singers  coming  to  England  made  a  point  of  coming  with 
an  introduction  to  Dr.  Burney.  And  while  they  were 
negotiating  an  engagement  in  London,  the  strangers  fre- 
quently gave  a  taste  of  their  quality  in  Dr.  Burney's 
drawing-room.  There  is,  besides,  a  sort  of  freemasonry 
among  artists,  which  makes  them  willing  to  render 
any  little  service  they  can  to  the  good-natured  and 
popular  in  the  brotherhood.  Hence  all  the  world  was 
eager  to  come  to  Dr.  Burney's  musical  parties,  where 
they  could  always  hear  the  newest  and  most  dis- 
tinguished things  in  music  ;  and  on  the  evenings  when 
Mrs.  Burney  received,  the  music-master's  humble  house 
in  St.  Martin's  Street  was  beset  with  fashionable  car- 
riages.    The  quiet  demure  little  daughter,  who  sat  shy 

and  silent  in  company  while  her  brain  was  teeming  with 
12 


124  THE    NOVEL 

comic  fancies,  and,  as  is  often  the  way  with  shy,  demure 
people,  boiled  over  with  comic  reminiscences  to  her 
sisters  when  the  visitors  were  gone,  had  thus  excellent 
opportunities  of  studying  the  ways  of  the  fashionable 
world.  But  Dr.  Burney  was  not  a  proud  man.  He 
allowed  his  children  to  play  with  the  children  of  a  wig- 
maker  in  the  adjoining  houses.  And  among  these 
humbler  acquaintances  Miss  Burney  picked  up  that 
acquaintance  with  life  in  a  different  plane  of  society 
which  made  the  fortune  of  her  first  novel. 

Sometimes  it  is  said  now  that  "Evelina  "was  over- 
rated in  its  day.     It  is  impossible  not  to  acknowledge 
that  she  painted  manners  and  habits  with  sprightliness 
and  fidelity,  but  it  is  said   that  "when  she  rises  from 
manners  and  habits  to  paint  feelings,  we  see  little  but 
indecision  on    the    one   hand    or   exaggeration    on    the 
other."     This  is  all  very  true,  and  yet  Miss  Burney  was 
undoubtedly  a  novelist  of  the  first  rank.     Undoubtedly 
she  would  be  overrated  if  she  were  put  on  a  level  with 
Richardson  as  an  analyst  of  feeling,  or  Fielding  as  a 
humorist,  or  George  Eliot  as  a  scientific  investigator  of 
cause  and   effect  in    emotional  changes,    or  any  other 
novelist  in  the  walk  in  which  his  special  strength  lies. 
But  there  are  varities  of  excellence,  all  equally  admirable 
of  their  kind,  and  Miss  Burney  was  pre-eminent  in  her 
special  kind,  because  she  attempted  only  what  she  was 
qualified  to  perform.     In  her  first  two  novels,  "  Evelina  " 
and  "  Cecilia,"  there  was  nothing  written  against  the 
grain  simply  because  it  was  supposed  to  be  the  right 
thine  for  a  novel  :  she  did  not  follow  the  fashion  of  her 
time  in  long-winded  sentimental  reflections  or  fine-spun 
analysis  of  feeling.     The  truth  is  that  her  writing,  after 
her  first  four  years  of  authorship,  was  a  failure,  because 
in  "  Evelina  "  and  "  Cecilia  "  she  had  exhausted  all  that 
was  fresh  in  her  observation  of  manners,  and  assumed 
thereafter  a  point  of  view  that  was  not  natural  to  her. 
The    next   pre-eminent   work    of    fiction    after   Miss 


THE    "MYSTERIES    OF    UDOLPHO  "  125 

Burney's  novels  was  the  "  Mysteries  of  Udolpho,"  pub- 
lished in  1794,  and  also  written  by  a  woman.  It  was 
not  a  novel — a  story  of  real  life  and  character — but  a 
romance.  In  the  preface  in  which  Horace  Walpole  had 
acknowledged  the  authorship  of  the  "  Castle  of  Otranto," 
while  claiming  the  credit  of  having  invented  a  new 
species  of  romance,  he  modestly  admitted  that  he  was 
sensible  of  his  own  inability  to  give  full  effect  to  his 
conception,  and  expressed  a  hope  that  he  had  paved  the 
way  for  "  men  of  brighter  talents,"  superior  to  himself 
in  the  imagination  and  the  exhibition  of  the  passions. 
This  good  wish  was  not  fulfilled  for  nearly  thirty  years, 
and  was  then  fulfilled  by  a  woman  of  brighter  talents, 
Mrs.  Radcliffe.  She  adopted  Walpole's  idea  of  giving 
the  imagination  freer  play  in  the  invention  of  incidents 
than  the  novelist  could  do  if  he  kept  to  the  manners  of 
modern  life.  But  she  adopted  his  idea  with  an  important 
difference  as  regarded  the  license  of  improbability  that 
he  allowed  himself.  It  is  curious  to  note  how  the  license 
that  Walpole  sought  for  the  imagination  was  gradually 
abridged  by  those  who  caught  up  his  idea  and  followed 
in  his  track.  The  most  successful  of  his  imitators 
before  Mrs.  Radcliffe  was  another  woman,  Clara  Reeve, 
a  very  industrious  authoress,  who  produced  what  she 
called,  after  Walpole,  a  Gothic  Romance,  the  "Old 
English  Baron,"  in  1777.  But  Mrs.  Reeve,  though  she 
owned  him  as  a  master,  declined  to  be  led  by  him  in  one 
particular  ;  she  thought  that  he  went  too  far  with  his 
supernatural  improbabilities.  Statues  that  drop  blood, 
swords  that  take  a  hundred  men  to  lift,  pictures  that 
groan  and  walk  out  of  their  frames,  struck  her  as  need- 
lessly wild  inventions,  calculated  to  shake  the  reader's 
faith  in  the  story  and  give  it  a  grotesque  and  ridiculous 
air,  such  as  a  nursery  tale  has  for  a  grown  man.  Accord- 
ingly Mrs.  Reeve  drew  the  line  at  ghosts.  There  is  a 
haunted  wing  in  the  castle  of  the  old  English  baron,  and 
there  is  an  heir  wrongfully  kept  from  his  inheritance, 


126  THE    NOVEL 

and  brought  up  as  a  peasant's  son  ;  but  for  the  punish- 
ment  of  the  wrong-doer,  and  the  restoration  of  the 
defrauded  youth  to  his  own,  the  only  supernatural 
machinery  employed  is  the  ghost  of  a  murdered  man. 
Thus  far  Mrs.  Reeve  abridged  the  license  for  the  super- 
natural allowed  by  the  authority  of  Walpole,  and  Mrs. 
Radcliffe  imposed  on  herself  a  still  stricter  self-denying 
ordinance.  She  abjured  the  supernatural  altogether, 
and  yet  contrived  to  keep  her  readers  from  first  to  last 
in  an  atmosphere  of  mysterious  excitement  and  super- 
stitious dread.  There  are  no  supernatural  agents  in  her 
tales — neither  wizard  nor  spectre  ;  every  thing  that 
happens  is  carefully  explained  as  being  due  to  natural 
causes  ;  yet  we  are  kept  in  a  flutter  and  fever  of  excite- 
ment as  much  as  if  evil  spirits  and  good  spirits  were  con- 
stantly at  work  around  us.  The  situations  are  eerie  ;  she 
puts  us  in  scenes  where  we  are  liable  to  the  invasion  of 
superstitious  panic,  in  dark  forests  and  lonely  castles,  with 
long  echoing  corridors  and  secret  passages  and  rooms 
shut  up  because  they  are  believed  to  be  haunted  ;  she  sur- 
rounds us  with  turbulent,  desperate,  unscrupulous  char- 
acters. Unaccountable  sounds  are  heard  when  our  feel- 
ings are  deeply  interested  in  the  fate  of  hero  or  heroine, 
voices  where  no  speaker  is  visible,  strains  of  music  in 
lonely  places  where  it  seems  all  but  impossible  that  any 
musician  should  be;  there  are  unaccountable  apparitions 
and  marvellous  disappearances.  There  is  generally  some 
mystery  afloat  ;  when  one  has  been  cleared  up,  we  are 
not  suffered  long  to  breathe  freety  before  we  are  caught 
in  the  toils  of  another.  Yet  all  the  time  only  human 
agents  are  at  work  ;  there  is  nothing  improbable  except 
the  extraordinary  combination  of  circumstances,  nothing 
supernatural  except  in  the  superstitious  imaginings  of  the 
personages  of  the  story.  Every  thing  that  seemed  as  if 
it  must  be  the  work  of  spirits  is  carefully  and  fully  ex- 
plained as  the  story  goes  on.  Mrs.  Radcliffe  has  been 
censured  for  these  explanations,  as  if  they  were  a  mis- 


MRS.  RADCLIFFE   DISCARDS    THE    SUPERNATURAL       127 

take  in  point  of  art,  destroying  the  illusion  and  making 
us  ashamed  of  ourselves  for  having  been  imposed  upon. 
This  censure  I  can  regard  only  as  an  affectation,  unless 
when  it  comes  from  a  convinced  believer  in  ghosts. 
Such  persons  might  resent  the  explanation  as  casting 
doubts  upon  their  cherished  belief.     But  for  other  peo- 
ple I  can  see  nothing  that  could  be  gained  by  leaving 
the  mysterious   incidents   unexplained,  except   by  the 
authoress,  who  would  undoubtedly  have  saved  herself 
an  immense  deal  of  trouble  if  she  had  made  free  use  of 
ghosts  and  other  supernatural  properties,  whenever  she 
required  them,  without  taking  any  pains  to  explain  how 
the  facts  occurred.     I  read    the   story  myself  with  a 
double  interest  ;  I  enjoy  the  excitement  of  superstitious 
wonder  and  awe  while  the  illusion  lasts,  and  when  the 
mystery  is  cleared  up,  and  the  excitement  is  gently  sub- 
siding, I  am  in  a  mood  to  get  additional  enjoyment  from 
reflecting  on  the   ingenuity  of    the   complication  that 
gave  to  the  illusion  for  the  moment  the  force  of  truth. 
Yet  it    was  no  less  a  person    than   Sir  AValter   Scott 
that  set  the  fashion  of  objecting  to  Mrs.   Radcliffe's 
explanations.     If  we  were  to  enquire  curiously  into  the 
objection,  we  should  probably  find  that  the  enquiry  led 
us  into  one  of  the  differences  between  classical  art  and 
romantic  art.     Mrs.  Radcliffe,  although  in  the  main  a 
disciple  in  the  school  of  romantic  art,  yet  paid  homage 
to  classical  art  in  her  efforts  to  explain  the  strangest 
occurrences  by   accidents  within    the   limits  of  human 
possibility  ;  and  a  thoroughgoing   romanticist  like  Sir 
Walter  Scott  might  be  inclined  to  reprobate  this  con- 
cession.    Yet  one  great  leader  of  romantic  art  in  France, 
George  Sand,  followed  Mrs.  Radcliffe's  example,  and  in 
her  "  Consuelo  "  and  "  Comtesse   de   Rudolstadt"   ac- 
counted for  many  strange  and  apparently  supernatural 
occurrences  by  human  agency. 

It  was  justly  remarked  by  Mr.  George  Moir,  in  his 
treatise  on  Romance,  that  Mrs.  Radcliffe  has  in  later 


128  THE    NOVEL 

times  been  most  unjustly  made  to  bear  the  sins  of  her 
imitators.  "The  truth  is,"  he  says,  "  that  the  sarcasms 
which  have  been  directed  against  the  puerile  horrors 
of  Mrs.  Radcliffe  ought  justly  to  have  been  confined  to 
the  extravagances  of  her  successors,  who  imitated  her 
manner  without  either  her  imagination  or  her  judgment, 
and  conceived  that  the  surest  means  of  producing  effect 
consisted  in  pressing  the  springs  of  the  terrible  as  far  as 
they  would  go.  In  the  hands  of  these  imitated  imita- 
tors the  castles  became  twice  as  large  and  ten  times  as 
perplexing  in  their  architecture  ;  the  heroine  could  not 
open  an  empty  drawer  without  stumbling  on  a  mys- 
terious manuscript  written  by  her  father  or  her  mother  ; 
nor  leave  her  room  to  take  a  twilight  walk,  of  which  hero- 
ines are  always  strangely  fond,  without  stumbling  on 
a  nest  of  banditti  ;  the  gleam  of  daggers  grew  more 
incessant ;  the  faces  of  the  monks  longer  and  more 
cadaverous,  and  the  visits  of  ghosts  so  commonplace 
that  they  came  at  last  to  be  viewed  with  the  same  indif- 
ference by  the  reader  as  they  were  of  old  by  honest 
Aubrey  or  less  honest  Dr.  Dee." 


CHAPTER  X 

THE   NEW   POETRY 
COWPER— HIS  ALLEGED  REVOLUTION  ,OF  POETRY 

In  my  last  two  lectures  on  the  novels  of  the  eigh- 
teenth century  I  tried  to  show  you  how  much  the 
public  mind  was  occupied  with  this  new  kind  of  litera- 
ture. Poetry  was  for  the  time  pushed  aside.  You  will 
now,  I  trust,  understand  that  it  is  a  very  inadequate 
explanation  of  the  small  amount  of  poetry  that  was 
written  between  Pope  and  Wordsworth,  and  of  the 
poorness  in  quality  of  much  of  that  small  amount,  to  say 
that  the  poets  of  the  period  were  hampered  by  a  slavish 
subservience  to  classical  models.  There  is  abundance 
of  evidence  that  would-be  poets,  on  the  contrary, 
strained  after  originality.  Even  before  Pope  died, 
Matthew  Green,  a  poet  of  whimsical  and  dainty  vein, 
who  wrote  with  great  sprightliness  of  humor  and  light- 
ness of  touch,  made  it  his  boast  that  he  was  no  imi- 
tator : 

"  Nothing  is  stolen  :  my  Muse  though  mean, 
Draws  from  the  spring  she  finds  within  ; 
Nor  vainly  buys  what  Gildon  sells, 
Poetic  buckets  for  dry  wells." 

The  truth  is  that  Pope's  perfect  success  was  not 
encouraging  to  imitators  ;  there  was  no  chance  of  fame 
except  in  a  different  kind,  and  the  mood  of  readers, 
delighted  and  fully  occupied  with  prose  fiction,  was 
such  as  to  chill  poetic  genius  by  the  most  blighting  of 
all  influences,  indifference.  The  public  was  dancing  to 
a  different  tune,  and  the  poet  sat  silent  with  a  feeling 

129 


130  THE    NEW    POETRY 

that  he  must  pipe  in  vain.  Now  and  again  Poetry- 
made  a  violent  struggle  to  get  a  hearing  and  a  follow- 
ing, as  when  Churchill,  the  satirist,  in  the  sixties  of  the 
century,  throwing  all  the  refinements  of  Queen  Anne 
satire  to  the  winds,  laid  about  him  with  rude,  furious, 
distempered  force.  Pie  made  a  noise  in  his  time,  but 
when  interest  in  the  ephemeral  subjects  of  his  boisterous 
abuse  and  fierce  invective  had  passed  away,  his  verse 
had  not  sufficient  intrinsic  merit  to  command  readers. 
Churchill  certainly  was  no  bigot  to  classical  rules,  no 
victim  to  smooth  and  easy  couplets.  The  next  poet  to 
make  a  popular  and  enduring  mark  gained  his  readers 
by  accommodating  his  verse  to  an  easy,  familiar,  dis- 
cursive prose  style,  with  which  the  great  body  of  readers 
were  for  the  time  enchanted. 

It  is  usual  to  speak  of  Cowper  as  a  "  reformer  of 
poetry,  who  called  it  back  from  conventionality  to 
nature,"  and  as  the  herald  of  Wordsworth  and  Byron. 
Universally  this  new  movement  is  spoken  of  as  a  revolt 
against  the  authority  of  Pope  ;  and  as  it  took  place 
simultaneously  with  the  French  Revolution,  or  nearly 
so,  this  revolt  is  regarded  as  one  of  the  signs  of  the 
revolutionary  temper  of  the  time.  Now,  there  can  be 
little  doubt  that  the  intense  excitement  and  ferment 
produced  by  the  French  Revolution  and  the  career  of 
Napoleon  affected  the  poetry  of  the  time.  But  it  gives 
an  essentially  wrong  impression  to  speak  as  if  the 
struggle  of  the  French  people  with  a  corrupt  aristocracy 
and  royalty  stimulated  the  poets  of  England  to  take  up 
arms  against  their  poetic  tyrant,  and  depose  him  with 
anger  and  contumely.  We  can  hardly  speak  of  depos- 
ing a  tyrant  when  there  is  no  tyrant  to  depose.  And 
it  is  the  merest  fiction,  the  most  unsubstantial  shadow 
of  a  metaphor,  to  describe  Pope  as  tyrannizing  over 
English  poetry  at  the  close  of  the  eighteenth  century. 
A  poet  can  tyrannize  only  as  the  temporary  viceregent 
of  the  poetic  spirit,  and  the  poetic  spirit  itself  had  no 


cowper's  alleged  reform  of  foetry  131 

dominion  over  the  affections  of  the  English  people  at 
this  time.  Pope's  deposition  had,  in  fact,  been  accom- 
plished by  the  coming  to  power  of  prose  fiction.  There 
had  been  a  period  of  anarchy  in  poetry;  every  poet  had 
been  doing  that  which  was  right  in  his  own  eyes,  strug- 
gling desperately  after  something  new,  catching  at 
straws  like  a  drowning  man,  and  there  had  been  no  poet 
of  sufficient  eminence  to  establish  a  general  empire. 
There  was  nobody  to  revolt  against  when  Wordsworth 
appeared  ;  the  throne  was  vacant,  open  to  any  comer 
powerful  enough  to  establish  his  right  by  poetic  might. 
But  Cowper,  it  is  said,  called  poetry  back  from  con- 
ventionality to  nature.  He  pioneered  Wordsworth  in 
discarding  the  poetic  diction  sanctioned  by  the  Queen 
Anne  critics,  their  "  heightened"  expression,  their  vain 
endeavors  to  dress  nature  to  advantage.  That  is  to  say, 
Cowper's  diction  is  more  like  the  language  of  prose. 
But  was  this  a  revolt  against  the  tyranny  of  Pope  ?  It 
seems  to  me  more  accurate  to  describe  it  as  a  submission 
to  the  tyranny  of  the  novel-writers  and  pleasant,  dis- 
cursive prose-essayists.  Cowper  himself  began  his  liter- 
ary career  as  an  essayist  and  writer  of  light,  trifling 
verses  in  the  style  of  Prior  and  Green  ;  and  it  was  by 
applying  this  same  style  to  more  serious  subjects  that 
he  made  a  beginning  in  the  so-called  revolution.  The 
worst  of  the  revolution  explanation  of  the  great  move- 
ment that  Cowper  is  said  to  have  heralded,  an  explana- 
tion so  easy  and  simple  and  thought-saving,  is  that  it 
radically  misrepresents  the  sources  of  the  revolution, 
and  puts  out  of  sight  the  real  continuity  of  the  literary 
history  of  the  eighteenth  century.  It  would  lead  us  to 
suppose  that  the  simpler  diction,  the  discursive  method, 
the  prevalence  of  narrative  by  which  the  new  poetry 
was  characterized,  were  adopted  out  of  antagonism  to 
Pope  ;  whereas  really  the  new  poetry  was  enriched  by 
the  prose-essayists  and  novelists,  as  these  had  themselves 
received  benefits  from  the  Queen  Anne  poets.     There 


132  THE    NEW    POETRY 

had  thus  been  a  substantial  gain  in  literature  from 
generation  to  generation,  and  real  progress,  real  develop- 
ment. It  was  not,  as  the  revolution  explanation  would 
import,  that  the  Queen  Anne  style  had  been  discarded 
in  the  third  or  fourth  generation  as  an  entirely  false 
ideal,  as  a  wasteful  venture  in  a  wrong  direction,  an 
unprofitable  divergence  from  the  true  paths  of  imagina- 
tive literature.  The  prosemen  of  the  middle  forty 
years  of  the  century  were  helped  by  the  brilliant  epi- 
grammatic poets  of  the  Queen  Anne  time  ;  and  the 
poets  of  the  following  generation  received  light  and 
leading  in  their  turn  from  the  prosemen  of  the  genera- 
tion before  them.  Cowper,  the  herald  of  Wordsworth, 
may  perhaps  be  described  as  a  reformer  of  poetry,  but 
it  is  more  significant  of  his  historical  position  to  describe 
him  as  an  essayist  in  verse. 

In  the  numerous  biographical  and  critical  sketches  of 
Cowper,  among  which  the  latest,  Mr.  Goldwin  Smith's 
and  Mrs.  Oliphant's,  may  be  mentioned  as  perhaps  the 
best,  sufficient  attention  has  not  been  paid  to  Cowper's 
literary  work  in  his  early  manhood,  before  his  first  mad- 
ness and  his  conversion  to  Evangelical  Christianity,  the 
events  which  are  rightly  regarded  as  the  mainsprings  of 
the  poetry  now  associated  with  his  name,  "  Table  Talk," 
"  The  Task,"  and  the  "  Occasional  Poems."  The  work 
of  his  early  manhood,  while  he  was  still  a  buckish  and 
briefless  barrister,  is  generally  mentioned  ;  but  it  is 
slurred  over  as  if  it  were  of  no  consequence  in  his  his- 
tory, as  if  it  were  a  thing  that  had  nothing  in  common 
with  the  productions  of  his  regenerate  days.  It  can  be 
shown,  I  think,  that,  in  so  far  as  merely  poetic  qualities 
are  concerned,  this  early  work  was  quite  as  revolutionary 
or  unrevolutionary  as  the  poems  of  his  pious  old  age. 

With  the  main  outlines  of  Cowper's  life  you  are,  I 
dare  say,  familiar.  He  was  the  son  of  a  country  clergy- 
man, the  grandson  of  a  Justice  of  the  Common  Pleas, 
the  grand-nephew  of  a  Lord  Chancellor.     After  passing 


COWrER    CALLED    TO    THE    BAR  133 

through  Westminster  School  he  was  apprenticed  to  an 
attorney,  and  had  as  his  fellow-apprentice  the  famous 
lawyer  who  afterward  became  Lord  Thurlow.  The 
youths  spent  their  time,  he  tells  us,  "  in  giggling  and 
making  giggle,"  both  in  the  attorney's  office  and  in  the 
house  of  Cowper's  uncle,  where  dwelt  a  cousin  with 
whom  he  was  in  love.  Emancipated  from  the  attorney's 
office,  and  called  to  the  bar,  Cowper  took  chambers  in 
the  Temple,  and  lived  a  gay  and  idle  life,  trusting  to 
family  influence  for  a  sinecure,  and  doing  no  sort  of 
work  in  his  profession.  It  was  during  this  period  that 
he  wrote  the  poetry  and  prose  which  has,  I  think,  been 
unduly  neglected  in  dissertations  on  his  careei\  He  be- 
longed to  a  literary  set.  Two  of  his  Westminster  school- 
fellows, Bonnel  Thornton  and  Colman  the  dramatist, 
conducted  for  two  years  (from  January,  1754,  to  Septem- 
ber, 1756)  a  very  popular  periodical  in  the  style  of  the 
Spectator,  the  Connoisseur.  Cowper  was  an  occasional 
contributor.  The  gayety  of  these  young  Templars  may 
be  judged  from  the  fact  that  seven  of  the  old  West- 
minster boys  formed  a  coterie,  to  which  they  gave  the 
name  of  the  Nonsense  Club,  in  which  the  fun  of  giggling 
and  making  giggle  was  continued.  There  Cowper  lived 
till  he  reached  the  age  of  thirty-two,  when  a  long- 
expected  sinecure,  in  the  gift  of  his  kinsman  Major 
Cowper,  was  ready  for  his  occupancy.  This  was  the 
clerkship  of  the  Journals  of  the  House  of  Lords. 
There  were  two  sinecures  in  Major  Cowper's  gift,  and 
it  would  seem  that,  through  some  indecision  or  change 
of  purpose  on  the  poet's  part,  suspicion  was  aroused 
about  the  nominee,  and  it  was  resolved  that  he  should 
be  examined  as  to  his  competency  before  the  bar  of  the 
House  of  Lords.  Cowper  was  horror-struck  at  the 
prospect  ;  fiddled  excitedly  for  some  months  with 
preparations  for  the  ordeal ;  then  on  the  day  before 
attempted  to  commit  suicide,  and  was  found  to  be  out 
of  his  mind.     It  is  idle  to  speculate  upon  the  causes  of 


134  THE    NEW    POETRY 

this  catastrophe.  Madness  is  often  puzzling  to  the  most 
skilful  doctors,  making  enquiry  at  the  time  and  in  full 
possession  of  minute  circumstances  that  we  desire  in 
vain  to  know  in  a  historical  case.  Mere  fright  at  a  pub- 
lic examination  would  not  have  driven  Cowper  mad  if 
he  had  had  no  predisposition  to  madness.  But  a  small 
circumstance  may  suffice  to  upset  a  man  of  nervous,  sus- 
ceptible, irresolute  temperament,  when  his  natural  feeble- 
ness of  will  has  been  increased  by  want  of  occupation, 
and  his  health  deranged  by  want  of  exercise.  The  only 
premonitory  symptoms  of  Cowper's  madness  is  found  in 
a  poem,  written  nine  years  before  the  catastrophe  (in 
1754),  in  which  he  speaks  of  being  driven  to  poetry 

"to  divert  a  fierce  banditti 
(Sworn  foes  to  everything  that's  witty) 
That  with  a  black  infernal  train, 
Make  cruel  inroads  in  my  brain, 
And  daily  threaten  to  drive  thence 
My  little  garrison  of  sense." 

"  The  fierce  banditti  which  I  mean,"  he  adds,  "  are 
gloomy  thoughts  led  on  by  spleen."  The  spleen  in 
those  days  was  the  supposed  physical  source  of  hypo- 
chondria ;  a  melancholy  and  despondent  person  was  said 
to  be  suffering  from  the  spleen.  Matthew  Green  wrote 
a  poem  on  the  spleen,  and  the  banishment  of  its  depress- 
ing influence  by  wholesome  laughter  : 

"  To  cure  the  mind's  wrong  bias,  Spleen, 
Some  recommend  the  bowling-green  ; 
Some  hilly  walks  ;  all  exercise  ; 
Fling  but  a  stone,  the  giant  dies. 

"  Laugh  and  be  well.     Monkeys  have  been 
Extreme  good  doctors  for  the  Spleen  ; 
And  kitten,  if  the  humour  hit, 
Has  harlequin'd  away  the  fit." 

Unfortunately  Cowper  was  too  much  frightened  at  the 
prospect  of  appearing  before  the  Lords  to  take  the  excel- 


cowper's  madness  and  RECOVERY  135 

lent  advice  of  his  favorite  poet.  He  was  confined  for 
eighteen  months  in  a  lnnatic  asylum,  where  his  reason 
was  restored,  it  would  seem,  by  such  a  judicious  regimen 
as  might  have  averted  the  malady  if  it  had  been  employed 
in  time. 

Cowper  returned  to  sanity,  strange  to  say,  in  a  blaze 
of  religious  rapture.  His  physician,  Dr.  Cotton,  was  a 
pious  man,  a  writer  of  hymns,  and  used  to  hold  religious 
conversations  with  his  patients — an  ill-advised  thing,  as 
Mr.  Goldwin  Smith  remarks,  if  Cowper's  madness  had 
been  religious  mania.  In  the  poet's  case  religion  was 
not  the  malady,  but  an  element  in  the  cure.  One  morn- 
ing in  the  summer  of  1765,  after  a  visit  from  his  brother, 
lie  rose  with  a  new  sense  of  health  ;  at  breakfast  on  the 
bright  summer  morning  felt  still  better  ;  on  a  sudden 
impulse  took  up  the  Bible,  from  which  he  had  shrunk 
in  dull  despair  during  his  illness,  and  all  in  a  moment 
was  filled  with  an  ecstatic  conviction  that  he  had  made 
his  peace  with  God  and  was  again  in  his  right  mind. 
In  Cowper's  tender,  sensitive,  dependent  spirit,  with  an 
imagination  ever  running  swiftly  toward  intolerable 
horrors,  and  a  will  much  too  feeble  of  its  own  strength 
to  arrest  this  tendency,  the  doctrines  of  Evangelical 
Christianity  found  a  congenial  subject.  It  was  one  of 
those  instantaneous  conversions  which  Wesley  and  his 
disciples  believed  to  be  a  moment  in  the  history  of  every 
true  believer.  The  doctor  was  at  first  suspicious  of  this 
sudden  change  in  his  patient,  but  his  doubts  were  soon 
removed.  Cowper  had  really  recovered,  and  found  in 
his  ecstatic  faith  the  stay  and  support  that  his  depen- 
dent spirit  required. 

It  is  doubtful  whether  the  recovery  would  have  been 
permanent, — it  was  never  permanent  in  the  sense  of  being 
securely  fixed  against  accident,  but  it  is  doubtful  whether 
it  would  have  been  as  permanent  as  it  was, — had  not  a 
fortunate  clfance  thrown  him  in  the  way  of  the  Unwin 
family  when  he  was  discharged  from  the  asylum.     Mrs. 


136  THE    NEW    POETRY 

Unwin  was  a  woman  born  to  be  the  support  of  such  a 
man  :  gentle  in  her  way,  so  as  never  to  wound  his 
tenderly  fastidious  taste  ;  unaffected ly  pious,  so  as  to 
comfort  him  in  his  doubts  and  fears,  and  confirm  his 
ecstasies  with  the  sweetness  of  her  sympathy  ;  yet  with 
all  this  of  a  cheerful  temper,  and  always  ready  to  laugh 
with  a  hearty  genuine  ring  at  the  sallies  of  his  exuberant 
humor.  There  never  was  a  more  perfect  compatibility 
of  temper.  Mr.  Unwin  was  alive  when  they  first  met, 
and  the  poet  was  admitted  as  a  lodger  into  their  par- 
sonage ;  but  they  continued  to  live  together  at  Olney 
after  his  death,  Mrs.  Unwin  tending  him  and  humoring 
him  with  unfailing  gentleness  and  self-sacrifice.  There 
was  no  thought  of  marriage  between  them  ;  their  love 
was  not  the  love  of  lovers.  Much  has  been  written,  and 
not  a  little  insinuated,  about  the  relationship  between 
Cowper  and  Mrs.  Unwin  ;  but  I  think  Mrs.  Oliphant  is 
right  in  her  interpretation  of  the  poet's  character,  that 
he  belonged  to  a  class  of  men  celibate  by  nature,  born 
to  be  dependent  on  the  tender  ministrations  and  affec- 
tionate companionship  of  women,  yet  as  near  as  may  be 
devoid  of  passion.  Mrs.  Unwin  was  seven  years  older 
than  the  poet,  and  neither  her  son,  with  whom  he  cor- 
responded, nor  his  relatives,  who  were  greatly  pleased 
with  the  happiness  he  had  found,  seem  ever  to  have 
dreamed  of  regarding  the  gentle  rescued  lunatic  as  a 
dangerous  lover. 

Much  less  fortunate  for  Cowper  was  his  relationship 
with  an  overwhelming  Evangelical  enthusiast,  Mr.  New- 
ton, the  vicar  of  Olney,  the  converted  captain  of  a 
slaver.  It  was  at  his  instance  that  Mrs.  Unwin  and  the 
poet  settled  at  Olney,  to  be  near  him.  He  took  posses- 
sion of  them  after  Mr.  Unwin's  death,  and  no  priest  ever 
exercised  authority  with  more  arbitrary  confidence. 
Occupation  was  what  Cowper  wanted,  and  Mr.  Newton 
found  him  occupation  in  regular  spiritual  exercises,  in 
visiting  the  sick  in  body  and  in  mind,  and  in  writing 


INFLUENCE    OP   MRS.   UNWIN  137 

hymns.  For  some  time  Cowper  was  happy  in  the  voca- 
tion thus  found  for  him,  but  the  strain  was  too  much  ;  his 
mind  again  gave  way,  and  for  five  years  he  remained 
moody,  dejected,  and  full  of  capricious  insane  fancies. 
Gentle  Mrs.  Unwin  found  for  him  during  this  period  an 
occupation  in  which  he  took  a  childish  delight,  making 
chairs  and  tables  for  her,  and  cages,  baskets,  and  hutches 
for  his  pets,  of  whom  he  collected  a  great  number  about 
him,  having  at  one  time  "five  rabbits,  three  hares,  two 
guinea-pigs,  a  magpie,  a  jay,  and  a  starling  ;  besides 
two  goldfinches,  two  canary  birds,  and  two  dogs." 
When  the  long  fit  passed  off,  Mr.  Newton  again  set  him 
to  work  upon  hymns,  and  the  "  Olney  Hymns  "  were 
published  in  1779,  fourteen  years  after  the  poet's  first 
recovery. 

I  mention  this  period  to  show  you  how  long  the  poet 
was  in  finding  his  true  vocation — the  employment  in 
which  he  enjoyed  a  full  measure  of  happiness.  "  I  never 
received  a  little  pleasure  in  my  life,"  he  once  said  ;  "  if 
I  am  delighted,  it  is  always  in  the  extreme."  His  letters 
show  that  under  Newton's  dictatorship  he  was  often 
happy,  but  it  was  by  fits  and  starts.  It  was  a  fortunate 
thing  for  him  when  this  strenuous  spiritual  director  left 
Olney,  and  could  overawe  him  only  by  letter.  Not  long 
after  his  departure  Mrs.  Unwin,  with  her  quiet  pene- 
trating insight,  devised  an  employment  for  him  in  which 
he  found  four  years  of  unclouded  happiness.  She  had 
observed  that  he  was  never  so  completely  drawn  away 
from  himself  as  when  he  was  writing,  and  in  the 
November  of  1780  she  suggested  to  him  that  he  should 
attempt  a  poem  of  some  length,  and  gave  him  as  a  sub- 
ject the  "  Progress  of  Error."  The  poet  was  now  in 
his  native  element,  not  perfectly  suited  with  a  subject, 
but  still  more  at  liberty  to  indulge  his  quick  imagina- 
tion than  he  could  have  been  in  the  composition  of 
hymns.  He  set  to  his  new  employment  with  delight, 
and   produced   in   quick   succession   the   "  Progress  of 


138  THE    NEW    POETRY 

Error,"  "Table  Talk,"  "Truth,"  "Expostulation," 
"  Hope,"  "  Charity,"  "  Conversation,"  and  "  Retirement." 
Mr.  Newton  from  a  distance  expressed  doubts  about  the 
new  departure,  but  the  poet  pacified  him  with  the  idea 
that  his  verses  might  be  the  means  of  attracting  to  the 
true  faith  some  whom  the  truth  in  its  naked  severity- 
was  apt  to  repel.  Wesley  chose  lively  popular  airs  for 
his  hymns,  on  the  principle  that  it  was  not  well  that  the 
devil  should  have  all  the  best  tunes  ;  and  Newton 
apparently  tolerated  Cowper's  moral  satires,  as  he  called 
them,  from  a  similar  motive. 

The  "Moral  Satires"  were  published  in  1782,  and 
were  rather  coldly  received  by  the  critics.  It  was 
otherwise  with  his  next  publication,  a  work  begun  under 
a  different  influence,  an  influence  that  was  like  a  renew- 
ing of  the  poet's  youth.  The  casual  reader  who  has 
heard  in  a  vague  way  of  Cowper's  relations  with  devoted 
women  generally  couples  Mrs.  Unwin  and  Lady  Austen 
together  as  two  pious  Methodist  ladies  who  sacrificed 
themselves  to  cheer  the  gentle  poet's  melancholy.  But 
the  two  women  were  very  different  in  character,  and 
the  poet's  acquaintance  with  the  one  had  a  very  different 
course  from  his  acquaintance  with  the  other.  The  one 
by  her  patient,  forbearing,  sympathetic  companionship 
did  most  for  his  happiness  ;  the  other  in  a  brief  angel's 
visit  did  most  for  his  reputation.  Mrs.  Unwin  was  his 
household  friend  and  slave  for  more  than  thirty  years  ; 
Lady  Austen  was  his  gay  and  sparkling  playfellow  for 
less  than  three.  Lady  Austen's  settlement  in  Olney 
was  a  bright  interval  in  Cowper's  long  residence  there, 
which,  with  all  his  fitful  Evangelical  enthusiasm,  he 
could  not  help  feeling  to  be  a  monotonous  imprisonment 
when  he  remembered  the  bustling  variety  of  his  ten 
years'  life  in  the  Temple.  He  spoke  of  Olney  after  she 
left,  and  after  she  awakened  his  memories  of  other  days, 
as  a  "  moral  Bastille."  She  was  a  woman  of  the  world, 
very  different  from  the  quiet  Puritanic  country  clergy- 


LADY    AUSTEN'S    INFLUENCE    ON   COWPER  139 

man's  wife  ;  the  widow  of  a  baronet,  who  had  lived 
much  in  Paris,  handsome,  vivacious,  full  of  talk  and 
high  "spirits.  "  She  is  a  lively,  agreeable  woman,"  Cow- 
per  wrote  to  Newton  immediately  after  his  first  inter- 
view with  her — he  had  chanced  to  see  her  shopping  in 
Olney  with  her  sister,  one  of  Mrs.  Unwin's  few  intimates 
in  the  place,  and  had  requested  Mrs.  Unwin  to  ask  her 
to  tea.  "  She  has  seen  much  of  the  world,  and  accounts 
it  a  great  simpleton,  as  it  is.  She  laughs  and  makes 
laugh,  and  keeps  up  a  conversation  without  seeming  to 
labor  at  it."  Lady  Austen  was  charmed  with  the  poet, 
and  the  poet  was  charmed  with  Lady  Austen.  She 
brought  back  to  him  breezy  sketches  of  the  world  from 
which  he  had  so  long  been  secluded.  She  romped  with 
the  playful  old  boy  of  fifty,  playing  battledore  and 
shuttlecock  with  him,  while  Mrs.  LTmvin  played  on  the 
harpsichord.  She  told  him  diverting  stories,  among 
others  the  adventure  of  John  Gilpin,  which  kept  him 
awake  with  laughter  for  a  whole  night,  and  for  which  he 
rewarded  her  by  turning  it  into  verse.  But  above  all, 
his  "  Moral  Satires  "  being  now  completed  and  published, 
she  suggested  to  him  that  he  should  write  a  poem  in 
blank  verse,  and  when  he  asked  her  for  a  subject, 
laughingly  named  the  sofa  on  wdiich  she  sat.  This  was 
the  origin  of  the  series  of  poems  called  the  "  Task," 
composed  in  a  much  gayer  and  more  discursive  mood 
than  the  "  Moral  Satires." 

It  was  the  "  Task  "  that  made  Cowper's  reputation, 
and  it  was  inspired  by  a  revival,  under  Lady  Austen's 
companionship,  of  that  more  mundane  spirit  to  which 
he  had  long  been  a  stranger.  This  alone  would  make  it 
worth  while  to  look  back  and  see  what  his  writing  was 
like  while  lie  was  still  a  young  "  buck,"  as  the  phrase 
then  went,  living  in  chambers  in  the  Temple,  and  gig- 
gling and  making  giggle  at  his  uncle's  house  in  South- 
ampton Row.  We  have  seen  what  the  Methodist  spirit 
did  for  him.  It  inspired  the  "  Olney  Hymns"  and  the 
13 


140  THE    NEW    POETRY 

"  Moral  Satires,"  and  neither  of  these  performances 
made  the  great  world  outside  the  Evangelical  circle  feel 
that  a  new  poet  had  arisen  in  England.  This  achieve- 
ment was  reserved  for  the  "  Task,"  written  during  the 
temporary  resuscitation  of  a  half-disused  way  of  look- 
ing at  the  world,  written  in  a  gayer  mood,  and  therefore 
it  is  of  interest  to  look  at  the  tone  and  style  of  Cowper's 
first  writing,  before  he  came  under  Methodist  influence. 
Cowper  contributed  three  papers  to  the  Connois- 
seur, in  March,  April,  and  May,  1756,  Nos.  Ill,  115,  119. 
If  we  did  not  know  that  they  were  Cowper's,  they 
would  strike  us  as  extremely  clever  and  idiomatically 
written  imitations  of  Addison,  the  great  exemplar  of 
periodical  essayists  at  the  time.  Knowing  that  they  are 
Cowper's,  and  induced  thereby  to  scrutinize  them  more 
closely,  we  have  no  difficulty  in  detecting  the  peculiar 
note  of  playfully  extravagant  humor  with  which  we  are 
familiar  in  the  "  Task."  The  first  of  the  papers  is  an 
absurd  description  of  "the  delicate  Billy  Suckling,  the 
contempt  of  the  men,  the  jest  of  the  women,  and  the 
darling  of  his  mamma  " — a  picture  of  an  impossible 
young  milksop  who  fancies  himself  a  buck.  Neither 
then  nor  afterward  was  Cowper  capable  of  drawing 
human  character  from  life  ;  his  uncontrollable  sense  of 
fun  pushed  him  into  comic  exaggerations  that  seem 
rather  silly  to  people  less  easily  tickled.  The  fun  of  the 
second  paper,  a  letter  from  an  old  bachelor,  Christopher 
Ironside,  describing  his  persecution  by  young  ladies,  is 
equally  extreme,  but  not  so  obvious  ;  and  ma}r,  perhaps, 
be  taken  as  throwing  some  light  on  the  kind  of  romp. 
ing  that  went  on  between  Cowper  and  his  cousins  in 
Southampton  Row  : 

"  The  female  part  of  my  acquaintance  entertain  an  odd  opinion 
that  a  Bachelor  is  not  in  fact  a  rational  creature  ;  at  least,  that  he 
has  not  the  sense  of  feeling  in  common  with  the  rest  of  mankind  ; 
that  a  Bachelor  may  be  beaten  like  a  stockfish  ;  that  you  may 
thrust  pins  into  his  legs,  and  wring  him  by  the  nose  ;  in  short, 


LETTER  PROM  AN  OLD  BACHELOR        141 

that  you  cannot  take  too  many  liberties  with  a  Bachelor.  I  am 
at  a  loss  to  conceive  on  what  foundation  these  romping  philoso- 
phers have  grounded  their  hypothesis,  though  at  the  same  time 
I  am  a  melancholy  proof  of  its  existence,  as  well  as  of  its  ab- 
surdity. 

"  A  friend  of  mine,  whom  I  frequently  visit,  has  a  wife  and 
three  daughters,  the  youngest  of  which  has  persecuted  me  these 
ten  years.  These  ingenious  young  ladies  have  not  only  found  out 
the  sole  end  and  purpose  of  my  being  themselves,  but  have 
likewise  communicated  their  discovery  to  all  the  girls  in  the 
neighbourhood  ;  so  that  if  they  happen  at  any  time  to  be  apprised 
of  my  coming  (which  I  take  all  possible  care  to  prevent)  they 
immediately  despatch  half  a  dozen  cards  to  their  faithful  allies, 
to  beg  the  favour  of  their  company  to  drink  coffee  and  help  tease 
Mr.  Ironside.  Upon  these  occasions  my  entry  into  the  room  is 
sometimes  obstructed  by  a  cord,  fastened  across  the  bottom  of  the 
door-case  ;  which,  a^  I  am  a  little  near-sighted,  I  seldom  discover 
till  it  has  brought  me  on  my  knees  before  them.  While  I  am 
employed  in  brushing  the  dust  from  my  black  rollers,  or  chafing 
my  broken  shins,  my  wig  is  suddenly  conveyed  away." 

In  the  last  of  these  papers  there  are  comic  descriptions 
of  the  behavior  of  various  characters  when  in  possession 
of  a  secret — all  in  the  same  strain  of  simple,  childlike 
exaggeration.  At  this  period  Cowper  scribbled  a  great 
deal  more  than  hp  printed.  These  three  papers  in  the 
Connoisseur  are  specimens  of  the  early  practice  by 
whic'a  he  acquired  the  mastery  of  comic  description 
that  appears  occasionally  in  the  "  Task  " — the  abundance 
of  detail,  and  the  felicity  of  phrase.  It  was  in  writing 
prose  essays  and  prose  letters  that  Cowper  acquired 
the  copious,  easy,  familiar  diction  that  entitles  him  to 
rank  with  poetic  reformers.  Cowper  is  often  referred 
to  as  an  example  of  a  man  whose  fancy  and  imagination 
blossomed  late  in  life,  because  he  was  fifty  before  be 
acquired  reputation  as  a  poet.  That  a  man  much  tried 
by  physical  suffering  should,  in  the  evening  of  his  days, 
take  up  his  pen  and  write  poetry  with  a  serious  purpose, 
tiying  thereby  to  catch  trifles  which  could  not  be 
caught  in  any  other  way,  has  a  look  as  of  inspiration. 


142  THE    NEW    POETRY 

This,  no  doubt,  has  contributed  to  perpetuate  the  delu- 
sion. But  it  will  not  bear  examination.  Cowper  not 
only  wrote  prose  with  exquisite  grace  and  skill  in  his 
youth,  but  his  manner  as  a  verse-writer  was  also  fully 
formed  before  he  was  thirty.  At  the  age  of  seventeen 
he  wrote  some  work, — heroic  blank  verse  in  imitation  of 
Philips's  "  Splendid  Shilling," — that  shows,  even  in  the 
opinion  of  Southey,  the  same  character  as  the  blank 
verse  of  the  "  Task,"  written  when  he  was  more  than 
fifty.  That  he  read  little  poetry,  in  fact,  confined  his 
reading  to  Milton  after  his  first  attack  of  madness,  is 
unduly  insisted  on,  if  the  meaning  is  to  prove  that  his 
poetry  came  fresh  out  of  a  mind  unacquainted  with 
what  had  been  done  before,  and  consequently  having 
no  relation  with  preceding  literature.  It  must  be  re- 
membered that  Cowper  was  thirty-two  before  madness 
first  overtook  him,  and  that  all  through  his  early 
manhood  he  led  a  life  of  perfect  leisure,  his  only 
employment  being  to  read  and  write  for  his  own 
amusement. 

Very  soon  after  the  "  Task  "  was  completed  Cowper 
lost  the  pleasant  company  of  the  "fair"  who  had 
"  commanded  "  it.  A  certain  mystery  hangs  over  the 
cause  of  Lady  Austen's  sudden  departure  from  Olney. 
There  was  obviously  some  disturbance  in  the  harmony 
of  the  happy  family,  and  there  has  been  much  specula- 
tion as  to  the  cause.  "  What  else  was  to  be  expected  ?  " 
many  people  ask.  Mrs.  Unwin  naturally  became  jealous 
of  Cowper's  attentions  to  her  gay  and  fashionable  rival, 
and  he,  having  to  choose  between  them,  was  bound  in 
honor  to  stand  by  his  lifelong  companion  and  nurse. 
No  other  result  was  to  be  expected  when  two  women 
were  attached  to  one  man.  This  is  the  easiest  explana- 
tion, but  it  has  the  defect  of  not  suiting  what  we  know 
of  the  characters  of  the  three  persons  concerned. 
Strange  to  say,  or  rather  it  would  be  strange  to  say  if 
we  were  not  aware  of  the  extent  to  which  men  of  repu- 


LADY    AUSTEN    LEAVES    OLNEY  143 

tation  are  idolized,  nobody  has  thought  of  putting  any 
of  the  blame  on  the  poet,  if  blame  there  was  in  the  mat- 
ter.    The  rupture  must  have  been  brought  about  either 
by   Lady  Austen's   grasping   eagerness   to   have  more 
than  her  fair  share  of  the  poet's  attentions,  or  by  Mrs. 
Unwin's  unreasonable  jealousy.     It  seems  to  me  much 
more  likely  that  the  coolness  which  led  to  Lady  Austen's 
departure  arose  between  Cowper  and  herself,  and  that 
the  long-suffering,  patient  Mrs.  Unwin  had  nothing  to 
do  with  it  ;  that  it  was  not  strained  relations  between 
the  two  ladies,  but  strained  relations  between  one  of 
them  and  the  poet,  that  broke  up  the  alliance.    Whether 
Lady  Austen  was  in  love  with  Cowper  or  not  is  a  ques- 
tion we  have  no  means  of  deciding.     It  is  not  unlikely. 
Men  incapable  of  feeling  passion  themselves  may  not  be 
incapable  of  inspiring  passion  in  others.     Lady  Austen 
afterward  married  a  Frenchman  of  letters,  M.  de  Tardiff, 
and   Cowper,  though  much  older  than  her,  being  fifty 
when  she  made  his  acquaintance,  besides  being  a  poet, 
had  a  boyish  playfulness  of  temper  and  a  quickness  of 
wit  not  without  their  charm.     Whether  in  love  with  him 
or  not,  Lady  Austen  certainly  sought  his  society,  though 
a  o-reat  liking  for  the  ministrations  of  Mr.  Scott,  the 
curate,  was  her  ostensible  reason  for  taking  a  house  in 
Olney.     Now,  Cowper,  though  gentle,  affectionate,  and 
playful,  would  seem  to  have  had  his  full  share  of  the 
invalid's  fretful,  exacting,  and    capricious    selfishness, 
and   it  is  quite  conceivable  that  Lady  Austen,  by  no 
means  so  patient   and   self-denying  a  woman  as  Mrs. 
Unwin,  may   simply   have   tired   of  his  exactions  and 
caprices.     If  we  read  between  the  lines  of  one  of  his 
letters  to  his  cousin,  Lady  Hesketh,  this  explanation  is 
almost  forced  upon  us.     "  On  her  first  settlement  in  our 
neighborhood,"  Cowper  writes,   "  I  made    it    my  own 
particular  business  (for  at  that  time  I  was  not  emploj^ed 
in  writing,  having  published  my  first  volume  and  not 
begun  my  second)  to  pay  my  devoirs  to  her  ladyship 


144  THE    NEW    POETRY 

ft 

every  morning  at  eleven.  Customs  very  soon  become 
laws.  I  began  the  '  Task,'  for  she  was  the  lady  who 
gave  me  the  Sofa  for  a  subject.  Being  once  engaged 
in  the  work,  I  began  to  feel  the  inconvenience  of  my 
morning  attendance.  We  had  seldom  breakfasted  our- 
selves till  ten  ;  and  the  intervening  hour  was  all  the 
time  I  could  find  in  the  whole  day  for  writing,  and  oc- 
casionally it  would  happen  that  the  half  of  that  hour  was 
all  that  I  could  secure  for  the  purpose.  But  there  was 
no  remedy.  Long  usage  had  made  that  which  was  at  first 
optional  a  point  of  good-manners,  and  consequently  of 
necessity,  and  I  was  forced  to  neglect  the  '  Task  '  to  at- 
tend upon  the  Muse  who  had  inspired  the  subject.  But 
she  had  ill  health,  and  before  I  had  quite  finished  the 
work  was  obliged  to  repair  to  Bristol."  The  sprightly 
Muse,  with  all  her  stability  of  temper,  sense  of  religion, 
and  seriousness  of  mind,  must  soon  have  become  disa- 
greeably conscious  of  the  difference  between  the  forced 
attendance  of  a  wayward  and  irritable  invalid  with  his 
thoughts  elsewhere,  and  the  effusive  camaraderie  with 
which  he  sought  her  company  in  the  bright  days  of 
their  first  companionship. 

"  O  Love  !  it  is  a  pleasant  thing 
A  little  time,  while  it  is  new." 

Mrs.  Unwin  might  not  have  resented  the  change,  but 
Lady  Austen  was  not  Mrs.  Unwin,  and  she  "repaired 
to  Bristol."  We  might  have  understood  the  cause  of 
the  separation  better  if  the  lady  had  kept  Cowper's 
letter  of  farewell,  but  she  was  so  dissatisfied  with  it 
that  she  threw  it  in  the  fire — tempted,  perhaps,  for  once 
in  her  life,  to  believe  that  Methodism  was  cant.  Lady 
Austen  was  too  exacting,  or  Cowper  was  too  exacting  ; 
anyhow,  they  could  not  get  on  together — any  explana- 
tion you  please  except  that  Mrs.  Unwin  was  jealous. 
To  entertain  this  explanation  for  a  moment  is  to  commit 


LADY    AUSTEN   LEAVES    OLNEY  145 

the  most  senseless  outrage  on  the  memory  of  a  gentle, 
self-denying  woman  who  bore  with  all  the  crazy  poet's 
selfish  whims  and  caprices,  and  watched  over  him  with 
more  than  a  mother's  love  till  her  own  mind  gave  way 
under  the  strain. 


CHAPTER  XI 

SCOTTISH    POETRY    IN   THE    EIGHTEENTH   CENTURY 

THE  ELEVATION  OF  A  DIALECT  INTO  A  LITERARY  LANGUAGE — 
INFLUENCE  OF  OLD  BALLADS — WATSON'S  "COLLECTION  " — ALLAN 
RAMSAY — THE  EASY  CLUB — "THE  GENTLE  SHEPHERD" — 
SONG-WRITERS — SKINNER,  ETC.  — FERGUSSON — BURNS 

If  the  eighteenth  century  was  a  comparatively  barren 
period  in  English  poetry,  it  was  otherwise  in  Scotch 
poetry.  It  witnessed  in  Scotland  an  extraordinary 
phenomenon,  the  elevation  of  a  dialect  by  the  genius  of 
one  man  to  a  place  among  literary  languages. 

People  have  almost  ceased  wondering  that  a  ploughman 
should  have  proved  himself  capable  of  great  work  in 
literature,  but  it  is  still  customary  to  speak  of  Burns  as 
an  uneducated  man.  Now,  we  may  lay  it  down  as  an 
axiom  that,  whenever  a  man  does  great  work  of  any 
kind,  he  has  been  specially  educated  for  it,  if  not  by  the 
deliberate  care  of  parents  or  his  own  deliberate  choice, 
by  a  still  greater  school-master,  Accident.  When  we 
find  any  apparent  exception  to  this  rule,  we  may  be  sure 
that  there  is  something  wrong  with  our  conception  of 
education.  Burns  is  an  apparent  exception  only  when 
we  take  education  to  mean  instruction  in  school  and 
college.  But  this  course  of  instruction  has  never  yet 
been  in  our  country  a  literary  education,  an  education 
for  the  man  of  letters.  It  has  been  at  best  but  an 
education  for  certain  professions  and  for  a  scholarly 
career.  Neither  school  nor  college,  as  they  were  in  the 
days  of  Burns,  could  have  contributed  one  iota  to  his 
efficiency  as  a  poet.  For  his  work  as  a  poet  he  had 
received  from  early  youth  the  best  possible  education. 

14G 


SCOTTISH    rOETRY    BEFORE   BURNS  147 

I  mean  as  regards  the  purely  technical  or  literary  quali- 
ties of  his  verse.  As  regards  the  feelings  that  he 
expressed,  the  character  that  is  reflected  in  his  poetry, 
though  the  feelings  are  in  the  main  healthy  and  the 
character  in  the  main  noble,  we  may  think  that  circum- 
stances might  have  been  a  more  perfect  school-master. 
But  his  literary  education  was  as  perfect  as  could  be 
desired.  What  a  poet  above  all  needs  is  an  easy  com- 
mand of  the  language  in  which  he  writes,  and  the  early 
training  of  Burns  was  excellently  fitted  to  give  him 
this. 

For  two  generations  before  Burns  wrote  there  had 
been  throughout  Scotland  an  unbounded  enthusiasm  for 
song-writing  in  the  native  dialect.  The  movement 
began  early  in  the  century  among  a  knot  of  idle  lairds, 
younger  sons,  and  Writers  to  the  Signet  in  Edinburgh  ; 
but  in  the  course  of  a  very  short  time  it  became  universal 
throughout  the  countiy.  Men  and  women  of  all  ranks 
took  part  in  it,  from  the  bold,  black-eyed,  lucky  Isabel 
Pagan,  who  kept  an  alehouse  in  Ayrshire,  to  the  accom- 
plished Lady  Anne  Lindsay,  daughter  of  the  Earl  of 
Balcarres.  Judges  of  the  Court  of  Session,  scions  of 
noble  houses,  ministers,  farmers,  gardeners,  shepherds — 
no  one  thought  himself  too  high  to  condescend  or  too 
humble  to  aspire.  All  were  ambitious  of  trying  their 
hand  at  a  rhyme  in  the  vernacular.  There  is  no  example 
in  history  of  a  literary  movement  so  widely  diffused, 
perhaps  because  up  to  that  time  there  had  been  no 
example  of  a  whole  people  through  all  its  ranks  educated 
to  read  and  write.  Miscellany  after  miscellany  poured 
from  the  press  collecting  the  effusions  of  the  wonderfully 
miscellaneous  herd  of  writers  ;  and  these  collections 
were  conned  in  moorland  bothies  and  kitchen  firesides 
as  ardently  as  in  libraries  and  drawing-rooms.  It  was 
in  this  school  that  Burns  received  the  literary  education 
that  fitted  him  for  his  work  in  life.  He  was  nourished 
on  two  generations  of  poetry  ;  taught  by  its  mistakes, 


148      SCOTTISH  POETRY  IN  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY 

warned  by  its  affectations,  inspired  by  its  enthusiasms, 
stimulated  by  its  successes.  He  had  a  large  body  of 
literature  before  him  in  the  same  kind  that  he  attempted  ; 
in  this  lie  was  steeped  to  the  lips.  But  how  was  the 
unlettered  ploughman  to  distinguish  between  good  and 
bad  ?  In  this  his  own  strong  sense,  clearness  of  insight, 
and  warm  passionate  nature  kept  him  right.  He  applied 
with  merciless,  unfaltering  severity  one  touchstone, — 
commonplace  enough,  in  words  at  least,  to  the  critics  of 
the  time, — truth  to  nature.     Pope's  praise  of  Nature  : 

"Unerring  Nature,  still  divinely  bright, 
One  clear,  unchanged,  and  universal  light, 
Life,  force,  and  beauty  must  to  all  impart 
At  once  the  source  and  end  and  test  of  Art  " — 

a  eulogy  that  Burns  had  by  heart — was  accepted  and 
applied  by  him  to  the  letter.  And  in  applying  this  test 
of  truth  to  Nature  to  enable  him  to  distinguish  between 
good  and  bad,  genuine  and  affected,  in  the  work  of  his 
predecessors,  and  to  guide  him  in  the  execution  of  his 
own,  the  peasant  had  a  decided  advantage  over  men  of 
higher  social  rank,  because  the  nature  that  the  Scotch 
poets  of  the  eighteenth  century  sought  to  interpret  was 
rustic  nature.  It  was  no  wonder  that  a  ploughman 
bore  off  the  laurel  crown  from  all  competitors  in  this 
keen  race  for  poetic  fame.  Who  but  a  real  country 
swain  was  to  be  expected  to  be  supreme  in  pastoral 
lyrics?  The  songs  of  Burns  would  have  been  much 
more  miraculous  if  he  had  been  any  thing  but  a  plough- 
man. 

Akin  to  the  vulgar  error  of  wondering  at  Burns  as 
an  uneducated  poet  is  the  error  of  regarding  Scotch 
vernacular  poetry  as  purely  indigenous,  a  growth  out  of 
the  hearts  of  the  people,  gradually  perfecting  itself  and 
taking  shape  unaffected  by  any  influence  from  without. 
Between  the  reigns  of  James  VI.  and  Queen  Anne  there 
was  no  poetry  of  note   written  in  Lowland  Scotch,     It 


KEVIVAL    OF    SCOTTISH    TOETRY  149 

had  its  roll  of  distinguished  names  while  the  Jameses 
reigned  in  Scotland — the  first  James  himself,  Henryson, 
Dunbar,  Lindsay,  Montgomery  ;  but  it  ceased  to  be  a 
literary  language  when  the  Court  was  removed  from 
Holyrood.  The  poets  went  with  the  Court ;  the  sing- 
in«-  birds  with  the  hands  that  caressed  and  fed  them, 
the  hearts  that  were  cheered  and  the  fancies  that  were 
humored  with  their  songs.  For  a  hundred  years  the 
Muse  of  Scotland  was  mute.  Immediately  after  the 
union  of  the  kingdoms  there  was  a  revival  of  poetry  in 
the  Lowland  Scotch.  That  this  revival  was  fostered 
by  the  growing  prosperity  of  the  country,  and  the  rise 
of.  a  new  class  of  wealthy  patrons,  is  highly  probable  ; 
but  it  is  a  very  common  opinion  that  the  new  growth 
of  fancy  and  imagination  which  these  men  encouraged 
was  entirely  spontaneous,  uninfluenced  either  by  the 
earlier  Scotch  poetry  or  by  the  poetry  of  the  southera 
centre  of  civilization  ;  that  it  was  the  offspring  of  the 
teeming  fancies  of  unsophisticated  men,  innocent  of 
any  literature  but  the  Bible  and  the  Shorter  Catechism. 
The  error  is  natural  enough,  if  we  think  of  the 
Scotch  poetry  of  the  eighteenth  century  as  peasant 
poetry,  written  by  peasants  for  peasants,  artless  jets  of 
song,  most  of  them  rude,  imperfect,  disfigured  by  make- 
weight epithets  and  make-shift  rhymes,  an  irregular  and 
uneven  stretch  of  poetry,  redeemed  from  ephemeral 
insignificance  only  by  the  semi-miraculous  genius  of 
one  of  the  peasant  poets.  None  the  less  is  it  an  error 
to  regard  this  poetry  as  of  entirely  spontaneous  genera- 
tion. If  it  is  worth  writing  about,  it  is  worth  enquiring 
into  ;  and  when  we  enquire  closely  into  its  beginning, 
we  see  that,  like  all  the  literary  growths,  it  had  its  seed- 
time as  well  as  its  harvest.  The  seeds  of  the  new  poetic 
vegetation  which  so  rapidly  overspread  the  country 
came  from  the  old  Scotch  poetry  of  the  sixteenth  cen- 
tury, and  as  it  grew  slips  were  grafted  on  it  from  plants 
that  were  flourishing  at  the  time  in  the  poetic  gardens 


150      SCOTTISH  POETRY  IN  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY 

of  England.  In  plain  language,  poetry  was  revived  in 
Scotland  by  reprints  of  the  old  Scotch  poetry,  and  the 
new  Scotch  poets  studied  the  English  poets  and  critics, 
and  in  the  first  instance  at  least  translated  into  their 
vernacular  and  applied  to  their  own  circumstances  the 
ideas  that  they  found  in  their  approved  masters.  The 
truth  is  that  the  peasant  poetry  of  Scotland,  so  far 
from  being  spontaneous  in  the  sense  of  being  uncon- 
ditioned by  previous  literature,  is  one  of  the  few 
unambiguous  and  decided  examples  of  the  influence  of 
critical  ideas  on  creative  literature. 

The  leader  of  the  poetic  revival  in  Scotland  was  Allan 
Ramsay,  but  the  work  that  marks  the  beginning  of 
better  days  was  Watson's  "Collection  of  Choice  Scots 
Songs,  Ancient  and  Modern,"  published  in  1706,  when 
Ramsay  was  a  young  man  of  twenty.  He  had  been 
bred  in  the  country,  or  near  Hopetoun  Mines  in  Lanark- 
shire, of  which  his  father  was  manager ;  but  his  father 
dying  when  he  was  a  child,  and  his  mother  marrying 
again,  he  had  been  sent  to  Edinburgh  at  the  age  of 
fifteen,  and  apprenticed  to  a  wigmaker.  "Watson's 
"  Collection  "  was  the  first  poetry  he  read.  He  was 
charmed  with  it ;  took  to  repeating  snatches  of  it ;  and 
from  humming  it  over  began  to  feel  an  impulse  to 
make  verses  himself.  It  was  thus  that  the  ingenious 
wigmaker  received  his  first  impetus  : 

"  Then  emulation  did  me  pierce, 
Wliilk  ne'er  since  ceased." 

Soon  after  chance  threw  him  in  the  way  of  more 
learned  amateurs,  and  brought  him  into  the  full  stream 
of  Queen  Anne  literary  influences.  There  were  modern 
as  well  as  ancient  poems  in  Watson's  "  Collection." 
Among  the  ancient  pieces  were  Dunbar's  "  Thistle  and 
Rose,"  and  the  humorous  poem  of  which  the  author- 
ship is  disputed  between  James  I.  and  James  V., 
"  Christ's  Kirk   on    the    Green."     Among   the    modern 


RAMSAY    AND    THE    EAST    CLUB  151 

contributors  was  William  Hamilton  of  Gilbertfield,  the 
"  Willie  "  who,  according  to  the  song,  was  a  "  wanton 
wag,"  a  roistering  young  Jacobite  lieutenant,  who 
formed  himself  apparently  on  the  poetic  ideal  of  the 
Restoration — a  Scotch  Etherege  or  Rochester.  The 
young  wigmaker  made  his  acquaintance,  probably  in 
the  way  of  business  ;  but  on  the  basis  of  their  common 
interest  in  poetry  the  acquaintance  became  more  inti- 
mate, and  Ramsay  was  admitted  a  member  of  a  club  to 
which  Hamilton  belonged  along  with  other  choice  spirits 
of  literary  leanings  and  Jacobite  political  faith.  The 
fact  that  Ramsay,  though  his  family  had  come  down  in 
the  world,  could  trace  his  descent  from  a  younger  son 
of  an  Earl  of  Dalhousie  probably  helped,  along  with  his 
social  and  poetic  gifts,  to  secure  him  admission  to  this 
Easy  Club,  as  it  was  called.  That  the  Eas}^  Club,  which 
was  broken  up  by  the  Rebellion  of  1715,  had  a  literary 
as  well  as  a  political  basis  is  shown  by  the  circumstance 
that  the  members  of  it  assumed  fancy  literary  names  ; 
and  the  bent  of  Ramsay's  literary  homage  at  the  time  is 
indicated  by  his  choice  for  himself  of  the  name  of  Isaac 
Bickerstaff,  then  famous  as  Steele's  pseudonym  in  the 
Tatter.  Ramsay  made  himself  so  popular  in  the  Easy 
Club  that  he  was  appointed  its  Poet-Laureate,  and  by  a 
formal  minute  adjudged  "a  gentleman." 

Through  these  Jacobite  gentlemen,  Ramsay's  friends 
and  patrons  of  the  Easy  Club,  with  leanings  to  the  good 
old  times  of  the  Stuarts,  and  a  disposition  to  scoff  at 
Puritans  as  their  natural  and  hereditary  enemies,  the 
spirit  of  the  Restoration  passed  into  the  peasant  poetry  of 
Scotland  to  do  battle  with  the  austere  spirit  of  the  Kirk. 
It  is  a  striking  illustration  of  the  vitality  of  ideas  and 
their  directive  power  over  conduct  that  the  Cavalier 
ideal,  transmitted  through  Ramsay,  took  possession  of 
the  warm  temperament  of  Burns,  and  worked  out  in 
him  the  incontinent  irregularities  that  made  shipwreck 
of  his  life.     Ramsay  himself  was  too  cool  of  temper  to 


152      SCOTTISH  POETRY  IN  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY 

be  made  a  victim  in  like  manner  ;  convivial,  quick- 
witted, libertine  enough  in  theory,  a  welcome  guest  at 
the  drinking-bouts  then  fashionable,  ever  ready  to  help 
in  driving  dull  care  away  with  a  jest  or  a  song,  he  was 
yet  sufficiently  master  of  himself  to  combine  poetry 
with  an  eye  to  business.  He  prospered  as  a  wigmaker  ; 
he  set  up  as  a  bookseller  ;  he  published  two  poetical 
miscellanies  by  which  he  made  some  money.  He  had 
none  of  Burns's  overscrupulous  and  fantastic  objection 
to  taking  payment  for  his  songs  ;  he  published  them  in 
broad  sheets  as  he  wrote  them  ;  and  it  is  said  to  have 
been  a  custom  with  the  good  wives  of  Edinburgh  to 
send  one  of  their  children  with  a  penny  for  Allan 
Ramsay's  latest.  "  Renowned  Allan,  canty  callan,"  was 
described  by  a  sour  critic  as  a  "convivial  buffoon"; 
but,  though  he  ruined  himself  late  in  life  by  building  a 
theatre  which  the  magistrates  would  not  allow  him  to 
open,  he  was,  like  his  contemporary  Pope,  a  good  man 
of  business.  Ramsay's  own  conduct  was  not  mastered 
by  the  ideal  of  reckless  generosity  and  self-indulgence 
to  which  he  gave  expression  in  his  poems  ;  but  none  the 
less  he  had  great  influence  in  connecting  poetry  with 
ostentatious  and  swaggering  profligacy  in  the  minds  of 
the  peasant  poets  of  Scotland. 

The  pleasure-loving  side  of  Ramsay's  temperament 
was  encouraged  and  expanded  by  his  connection  with 
the  Easy  Club  ;  and  it  was  in  this  connection  also  that 
in  all  probability  he  received  the  suggestion  of  the  work 
that  is  his  only  enduring  title  to  fame — "  The  Gentle 
Shepherd."  We  have  no  positive  evidence  that  he  con- 
ceived fully  the  idea  of  writing  such  a  work  at  this 
time — the  memoirs  of  his  life  are  exceedingly  scanty  ; 
but  it  is  all  but  certain  that  he  was  at  this  time  put  on 
the  road  that  led  him  to  this  pastoral  poem — the  first 
genuine  pastoral  poem  that  had  appeared  in  European 
literature  between  the  time  of  Theocritus,  in  the  third 
century  b.  c,  to  the  eighteenth  century.     This  conclu- 


ARTICLES    IN    THE    "GUARDIAN"  153 

sion  is  irresistible  when  we  look  at  the  chief  events  in 
English  literature  during  the  three  years  of  Ramsay's 
membership  of  the  Easy  Club.  He  was  a  member  of 
the  Club  from  1712  to  1715.  The  kind  of  poetry  that 
was  most  in  vogue  at  the  time  was  pastoral  poetry. 
We  have  already  seen  how  general  had  been  the  discus- 
sion of  this  kind  of  poetry  for  some  years.  During  the 
existence  of  the  Easy  Club  interest  in  the  topic  had 
received  a  fresh  stimulus  from  the  publication  of  Pope's 
"  Windsor  Forest,"  and  Ambrose  Pliilips's  "  Pastorals." 
For  the  purpose  of  puffing  Philips  and  depreciating 
Pope  there  was  a  series  of  articles  on  Pastoral  Poetry 
in  the  Guardian  which  doubtless  were  read  by  Isaac 
Bickerstaff's  double  in  the  Easy  Club.  Every-body 
who  had  any  pretension  to  literary  fashion  read  Steele 
and  Addison's  periodicals,  and  the  members  of  the  Easy 
Club  were  keen  and  ardent  amateurs  of  poetry,  not  a 
little  self-conscious  of  pontic  ambition.  To  puff  Philips 
and  depreciate  Pope  was  the  prime  purpose  of  these 
articles  in  the  Guardian,  and  this  purpose  was  cleverly 
defeated  by  the  stratagem  of  the  poet  whose  reputation 
was  in  danger  ;  but  unintentionally  and  by  the  way  the 
articles  served  a  more  important  purpose — namely, 
guiding  Allan  Ramsay  into  a  kind  of  poetry  exactly 
suited  to  his  talents.  One  of  the  papers  in  the  Guardian 
reads  now  like  a  recipe  for  Allan  Ramsay's  great  pas- 
toral ;  "  The  Gentle  Shepherd  "  might  be  said  to  have 
been  made  from  it  as  from  a  prescription,  so  exactly 
in  the  scheme  and  accessories  does  the  poet  follow  the 
advice  of  the  critic.  "  Paint  the  manners  of  natural 
rustic  life,"  said  the  critic  to  the  poet,  "  not  the  man- 
ners of  artificial  shepherds  and  shepherdesses  in  a  ficti- 
tious golden  age  ;  use  actual  rustic  dialect ;  instead  of 
satyrs  and  fauns  and  nymphs,  introduce  the  supernatural 
creatures  of  modern  superstition."  This  is  what  the 
essayist  in  the  Guardian  advised,  and  what  Ramsay 
with  happily  appropriate  genius  did.     I  know  no  other 


154      SCOTTISH  POETRY  IN  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY 

instance  in  literature  where  a  poet  lias  carried  out  tlie 
ideas  of  a  critic  so  perfectly.  Ramsay  pottered  for  a 
little  with  pastoral  dialogues  of  the  old  artificial  school, 
in  which  he  made  Steele  and  Pope  discourse  in  the 
character  of  shepherds  about  the  deaths  of  Addison  and 
Prior — a  fancy  rendered  all  the  more  absurd  by  his  mak- 
ing these  two  shepherds  discourse  in  the  Scotch  dialect. 
But  he  soon  abandoned  these  affectations,  and  produced 
his  drama  of  real  rustic  life  in  1725.  Its  repute  was 
instantaneous  and  widespread.  Edition  after  edition 
was  produced;  it  was  said  that  "  The  Gentle  Shepherd  " 
was  almost  as  common  a  book  in  the  houses  of  the 
Scotch  peasantry  as  the  Bible.  Amateur  companies 
were  organized  in  country  parishes  to  act  it.  Even  to 
this  day,  it  is  said,  such  companies  exist  and  perform 
occasionally  in  the  south  of  Scotland.  The  fame  of 
"  The  Gentle  Shepherd"  spread  beyond  Scotland  ;  it 
probably  furnished  the  hint  of  "The  Beggar's  Opera  "  to 
Gay ;  so  that  if  Ramsay  owed  something  to  the  critical 
ideas  of  his  English  contemporaries,  he  may  be  said  to 
have  repaid  the  debt. 

The  songs  interspersed  through  "  The  Gentle  Shep- 
herd," which  is  rather  an  operetta  than  a  drama,  are 
not  the  best  part  of  it.  I  cannot  say  that  I  think 
highly  of  Ramsay's  gifts  as  a  song-writer.  His 
genius  was  not  lyrical.  His  songs,  even  the  best 
of  them,  strike  me  as  smirking  and  affected,  entirely 
destitute  of  genuine  lyric  rapture.  We  have  onty  to 
place  his  "  Auld  Lang  Sjme,"  or  his  "  Nanny  O,"  by 
the  side  of  Burns's  words  to  the  same  airs  to  feel 
how  empty  they  are  of  lyric  sincerity  and  force,  how 
artificially,  mechanically,  and  laboriously  they  have 
been  put  together. 

"  How  joyfully  my  spirits  rise, 
When  dancing  she  moves  finely — O  ; 
I  guess  what  heaven  is  by  her  eyes, 
Which  sparkle  so  divinely — O. 


ramsay's  lack  of  the  lyric  art     155 

Attend  my  vow,  ye  gods,  while  I 
Breathe  in  the  bless'd  Britannia, 
None's  happiness  I  shall  envy, 
As  long's  ye  grant  me  Nanny — 0." 

— Ramsay. 

"Her  face  is  fair,  her  heart  is  true, 
As  spotless  as  she's  bonny — 0; 
The  opening  gowan,  wat  wi'  dew, 
Nae  fairer  is  than  Nanny — O. 
Come  weel,  come  woe,  I  care  na  by, 
I'll  tak'  what  Heaven  will  sen'  me,  O; 
Nae  ither  care  in  life  have  I 
But  live  and  love  my  Nanny— O  ! " 

— Burns. 

The  inferiority  of  Ramsay  is  still  move  manifest 
when  we  look  at  his  "  Auld  Lang  Syne."  The  opening 
lines  have  a  ring  of  insincerity  that  pervades  the  whole 
song  : 

"  Should  auld  acquaintance  be  forgot, 

Tho'  they  return  with  scars  ? 
These  are  the  noble  hero's  lot, 

Obtained  in  glorious  wars. 
Welcome,  my  Varo,  to  my  breast, 

Thy  arms  about  me  twine, 
And  make  me  once  again  as  blest 

As  I  was  king  syne." 

There  are  two  lines  in  Ramsay's  "  Farewell  to  Lochaber  " 
that  seem  to  be  conclusive  against  his  claim  to  a  respect- 
able place  among  song-writers.  A  soldier  bidding  fare- 
well to  his  sweetheart  is  a  well-chosen  lyrical  theme  ; 
Ramsay  had  abundance  of  poetical  intelligence,  and  is 
often  liappy  in  his  choice  of  themes.  And  the  opening 
lines,  when  sung  to  the  beautiful  air,  are  undeniably 
simple  and  touching  : 

"  Fareweel  to  Lochaber,  fareweel  to  my  Jean, 

Where  heartsome  wi'  thee  I  hae  mony  days  been." 
14 


156      SCOTTISH  POETRY  IN  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY 

But  presently  come  the  two  lines  which  strike  an  ab- 
surdly false  note,  and  turn  the  plaintive  soldier  into  a 
burlesque  impostor  : 

"  These  tears  that  I  shed  they  are  a'  for  my  dear, 
And  no  for  the  dangers  attending  on  weir." 

Fancy  a  departing  soldier  explaining  that  he  weeps  not 
because  he  is  afraid  of  the  enemy,  but  because  he  is 
sorry  to  leave  his  sweetheart  !  Qui  s'excuse,  s'accuse. 
The  girl,  if  she  had  a  particle  of  spirit,  would  have 
laughed,  and  set  him  down  at  once  as  a  transparent 
humbug.  No  man  capable  of  writing  a  good  song  with 
any  deep  sentiment  or  passion  in  it  could  have  passed 
such  a  preposterous  insincerity  as  that.  No;  "  renowned 
Allan,  canty  callan,"  had  not  the  lyric  gift.  His  strength 
lay  in  humorous  description  and  portraiture  ;  in  arch, 
sly,  "  pawky"  fun.  The  portrait  of  him  by  his  son  is  a 
speaking  likeness  of  the  poet  as  we  know  him  through 
his  works  ;  it  is  a  keen,  slyly  humorous  face,  the  face  of 
a  man  with  a  quick  sense  of  the  ridiculous,  and  a  firm 
touch  in  the  exhibition  of  what  amuses  him,  but  it  is 
not  the  face  of  a  lyric  poet. 

If  we  except  the  songs,  which,  as  I  have  said,  are  of 
rather  unequal  merit,  we  cannot  but  admire  the  manner 
in  which  Ramsay  embodied  the  idea  so  casually  sug- 
gested by  the  English  critic.  As  is  usually  the  case  in 
such  matters,  several  places  are  claimants  for  the  honor 
of  being  the  scene  of  the  poem,  but  probably  Newhall 
in  Peeblesshire  conforms  most  to  the  poetic  descriptions. 
The  plot  is  slender,  but  not  more  so  than  we  should 
expect  in  such  an  operetta,  and  the  scenes  are  connected 
with  no  little  dramatic  skill.  The  bulk  of  the  story  nar- 
rates the  pastoral  loves  of  Roger  and  Jenny,  and  of 
Patie,  the  Gentle  Shepherd,  and  Peggy,  a  shepherd's 
niece.  Sir  William  Worthy,  a  somewhat  priggish  but 
not  unamiable  knight,  is  the  presiding  genius  ;  in  Patie 
he  recognizes  his  son,  and  in  Peggy  his  niece,  and  the 


"the  gentle  shepheed  "  157 

faithful  lovers  receive  his  blessing.  Bauldy,  Madge, 
and  Mause  supply  what  comic  element  there  is,  but  the 
humor  is  of  a  quiet,  subdued  order,  never  approaching 
the  rollicking  fun  of  Burns.  The  light,  bantering  con- 
versation between  Peggy  and  Jenny  is  admirably  done, 
and  the  spirited  eulogy  of  Patie  by  his  sweetheart  is  a 
good  example  of  the  style  of  language  that  Ramsay  con- 
sidered most  suited  to  a  Scottish  pastoral  : 

"  Sic  coarse-spun  thoughts  as  thae  want  pith  to  move 
My  settled  mind,  I'm  o'er  far  gane  in  love. 
Patie  to  me  is  dearer  than  my  breath  ; 
But  want  of  him  I  dread  nae  other  skaith. 
There's  nane  of  a'  the  herds  that  tread  the  green 
Has  sic  a  smile,  or  sic  twa  glancing  een. 
And  then  he  speaks  with  sic  a  taking  art. 
His  words  they  thirle  like  musick  thro'  my  heart. 
How  blythly  can  he  sport,  and  gently  rave, 
And  jest  at  feckless  fears  that  fright  the  lave! 
Ilk  day  that  he's  alane  upon  the  hill, 
He  reads  fell  books  that  teach  him  meikle  skill. 
He  is — but  what  need  I  say  that  or  this  ? 
I'd  spend  a  mouth  to  tell  you  what  he  is  ! 
In  a'  he  says  or  does  there's  sic  a  gait, 
The  rest  seem  coofs  compar'd  to  my  dear  Pate. 
His  better  sense  will  lang  his  love  secure  ! 
Ill  nature  heft's  in  sauls  that's  weak  and  poor." 

In  a  prologue  for  "  The  Gentle  Shepherd  "  on  the  occa- 
sion of  one  of  its  presentations  on  the  stage  the  poet 
declared  : 

"  Tho'  they're  but  Shepherds  that  we're  now  to  act 
Yet,  gentle  audience,  we'd  not  ha'  ye  mistake 
And  think  your  entertainment  will  be  rude. 
Most  men  and  all  the  ladys  think  it  good  ; 
Our  Pastoral  Author  thinks  so  too,  but  fears 
The  diction  may  offend  some  nicer  ears. 
This  we  regard  not,  therefore  will  proceed 
To  act  the  blithsome  life  that  shepherds  lead." 

Now,  it  is  just  this  fact,  that  Allan  Ramsay  did  not 
"  regard  "  those  "  nicer  ears,"  that  constitutes  his  main 


158      SCOTTISH  POETRY  IN  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY 

literary  importance.  He  is  worthy  to  be  called  the 
pioneer  of  Burns,  because  he  had  the  sense  and  ability 
to  combat  victoriously  the  theory  of  men  like  Beattie, 
who  held  that  the  Scottish  language  was  incapable  of 
being  made  the  vehicle  of  literary  expression. 

Half  a  century  elapsed  between  the  publication  of 
"The  Gentle  Shepherd " and  the  boyhood  of  Burns, and 
meantime  the  impulse  given  by  Ramsay  and  the  inge- 
nious gentlemen  and  ladies  who  co-operated  with  him  in 
his  publications  had  diffused  itself  all  over  the  country. 
We  had  our  group  of  singers  here  in  the  North  :  George 
Halket,  the  author  of  "Logie  o'  Buchan";  Alexander 
Ross,  the  author  of  the  "Fortunate  Shepherdess"; 
Priest  Geddes,  author  of  "Lewie  Gordon"  and  the 
"Wee  Wifiekie";  and  greatest  of  them  all,  indeed,  one 
of  the  greatest  of  Scotch  song-writers,  John  Skinner, 
the  author  of  "Tullocligorum,"  and  the  "Ewie  wi'  the 
Crookit  Horn."  In  "  Tullocbgorum,"  especially,  there 
is  a  wonderful  rapidity  and  spirit  in  its  music — an 
indefinable  something  that  manifestly  proclaims  Skinner 
to  be  the  fellow-countryman  of  William  Dunbar  and 
Burns  : 

"  What  needs  there  be  sae  great  a  f  raise 
Wi'  dringing  dull  Italian  lays  ? 
I  wadna  gie  our  ain  Strathspeys 

For  half  a  hunder  score  o'  'em. 
They're  dowf  aud  dowie  at  the  best  ; 

Dowf  and  dowie,  dowf  and  dowie, 

Dowf  and  dowie  at  the  best, 
Wi'  a'  their  variorum  ; 
They're  dowf  and  dowie  at  the  best, 
Their  allegros  and  a'  the  rest ; 
They  canna  please  a  Scottish  taste, 

Compar'd  wi'  Tullocbgorum. " 

These  are  lines  that,  both  for  their  music  and  their  sen- 
timent, were  likely  to  appeal  to  Burns,  and  it  is  no  sur- 
prise, therefore,  to  find  Burns  writing  words  so  laudatory 


POETICAL   ASPIRATIONS    OF   BURNS  159 

as  these  :  "  I  regret,  and  while  I  live  I  shall  regret,  that, 
when  I  was  in  the  North,  I  had  not  the  pleasure  of 
paying  a  younger  brother's  dutiful  respect  to  the  author 
of  the  best  Scotch  song  ever  Scotland  saw — '  Tulloch- 
gorum's  my  delight.'  There  is  a  certain  something  in 
the  old  Scotch  songs,  a  wild  happiness  of  thought  and 
expression,  which  peculiarly  marks  them,  not  only  from 
English  songs,  but  also  from  the  modern  efforts  of  song- 
wrights  in  our  native  manner  and  language.  The  only 
remains  of  this  enchantment,  these  spells  of  the  imagina- 
tion, rest  with  you." 

It  is  remarkable  that  the  Northern  song- writers  were 
all  educated  men, — in  the  popular  sense  of  the  word 
educated, — school-masters  and  clergymen.  In  the  south 
of  Scotland  poetic  ambition  was  more  universal.  Then 
the  middle  years  of  the  eighteenth  witnessed  something 
like  the  palmy  days  of  the  Troubadours  of  Provence  in 
the  thirteenth  century,  when  every  hamlet  had  its 
laureate.  We  cannot  wonder  that  the  genius  of  Burns 
should  have  been  excited  by  such  surroundings,  and 
that  very  early  in  life  falling  in  love,  and  knowing  of 
neighboring  bards  who  addressed  verses  to  the  objects 
of  their  affections,  he  was  moved  by  an  ambition  to 
show  that  he  also  was  a  song-writer.  Thousands  of 
little  bards  at  that  time  limited  their  aspirations  to  fame 
within  the  parishes  in  which  they  were  born.  That  the 
ambition  of  Burns  took  a  wider  range  was  due  partly  to 
the  masterful  strength  of  his  nature — that,  of  course,  is 
an  indispensable  condition  of  wide-reaching  ambition  ; 
but  partly  also  to  peculiar  circumstances  in  his  life  that 
fostered  his  ambition  and  kept  it  from  being  quenched 
in  his  hard  struggle  for  bare  existence  as  the  son  of  a  poor 
farmer.  Where  other  young  men  in  his  rank  of  life,  like 
young  men  with  a  turn  for  versification  in  higher  ranks 
of  life,  were  eager  only  to  gain  the  admiration  of  the 
women,  and  establish  a  reputation  for  cleverness  with 
the  men  among  whom  they  were  born,  Burns  from  a 


160     SCOTTISH  POETRY  IN  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY 

very  early  period  aspired  to  make  the  streams  of  his 
native  country  as  famous  as  the  classic  Ilissus  and  the 
silver-winding  Thames  : 

"  E'en  then  a  wish,  I  mind  its  power, 
A  wish  that  to  its  latest  hour 

Shall  strongly  heave  my  breast ; 
That  I  for  poor  auld  Scotland's  sake, 
Some  useful  plan  or  book  could  make, 
Or  sing  a  sang  at  least ;" 

and  again  in  a  poem  showing  more  definitely  the  latitude 
of  his  ambition  : 

"  Ramsay  and  famous  Fergusson 
Gied  Forth  and  Tay  a  lift  aboon  ; 
Yarrow  and  Tweed,  to  monie  a  tune, 

Owre  Scotland  rings  ; 
While  Irwin,  Lugar,  Ayr,  and  Doon, 

Naebody  sings. 

"  Th'  Ilissus,  Tiber,  Thames,  and  Seine, 
Glide  sweet  in  monie  a  tunefu'  line  ; 
But,  Willie,  set  your  fit  to  mine, 

And  cock  your  crest, 
We'll  gar  our  streams  and  burnies  shine 

Up  wi'  the  best !  " 

And  the  natural  greatness  of  mind  that  prompted  this 
ambition  was  not  without  special  influences  to  keep  the 
flame  alive.  Had  Burns  been  educated  as  other  local 
rhymers  were,  he  might  have  remained,  like  them,  con- 
tent with  local  fame,  ignorant  of  the  great  world  out- 
side, hungering  for  no  applause  beyond  his  own  small 
circle,  because  he  was  unaware  of  any  thing  more  to  be 
desired.  But  the  education  of  Burns  was  different  from 
that  of  other  local  rhymers,  and  had  carried  him  to 
spiritual  altitudes,  the  views  from  which  were  bounded 
by  a  much  wider  horizon. 

In  common  with  all  the  other  young  men  of  the  time, 
rich  and  poor,  Burns  had  the  advantage  for  a  poet  of 


if 

HOW    BURNS    PRODUCED    HIS    SONGS  161 

living  in  a  poetical  atmosphere  ;  but  he  had  the  further 
special  advantage  of  coming  under  personal  influences 
that  helped  powerfully  to  give  his  work  the  quality  of 
greatness.  His  want  of  school  and  college  instruction 
was  fully  compensated  by  the  exceptional  tastes,  abilities, 
and  literary  interests  of  his  father  and  his  school-master. 
We  may  truly  say,  I  think,  that  for  his  special  training 
as  a  poet,  for  the  literary  part  of  it,  that  is  to  say,  the 
happiest  accident  of  his  life  was  his  contact  with  Mr. 
Murdoch,  who,  when  a  youth  of  eighteen,  was  employed 
by  William  Burness,  and  one  or  two  of  his  neighbors, 
to  teach  their  children.  That  this  young  school-master 
was  a  man  of  no  ordinary  vigor,  flexibility,  and  breadth 
of  interest  was  shown  by  his  subsequent  career.  He 
Avent  to  London,  and  made  a  living  as  a  teacher  of 
French,  an  extraordinary  feat  for  a  young  country 
Scotchman  ;  and  gained  such  repute  as  a  teacher, 
though  he  ultimately  ruined  his  prospects  by  intemper- 
ate habits,  that  at  one  time  he  had  as  a  pupil  in  English 
no  less  a  person  than  M.  Talleyrand.  We  can  hardly 
overestimate  the  lift  above  provincial  commonplace  that 
was  given  to  the  future  poet  by  his  contact  with  a  man 
of  such  activity  and  range  of  mind.  Mr.  Murdoch  was 
greatly  attracted  by  the  character  of  William  Burness, — 
for  so  the  father  spelled  his  name, — and,  attracted  also  by 
the  character  and  abilities  of  the  boys,  he  took  a  warm 
interest  in  them,  and  gave  an  unusual  turn  to  the  read- 
ing of  the  family,  introducing  them  to  authors  not  ordi- 
narily within  the  knowledge  of  a  peasant's  household. 
Robert  Burns  was  but  a  small  boy  when  Murdoch  was 
engaged  as  a  teacher  to  the  combined  families  ;  but 
when  he  was  a  youth  of  fifteen  or  sixteen,  the  young 
man  chanced  to  be  appointed  English  teacher  in  the  Ayr 
Academy,  and  the  elder  Burness,  always  eager  to  get 
education  for  his  sons,  sent  Robert  for  a  short  time  to 
board  with  him.  Charmed  with  the  aptness  of  his  pupil, 
with  his  manly  character,  his  enthusiasm  for  knowledge, 


162      SCOTTISH  POETRY  IN  THE  EIGHTEEETH  CENTURY 

and  his  powerful  grasp  of  intellect,  Murdoch  did  his 
utmost  to  give  a  bent  to  his  studies.  It  was  only  for  a 
short  three  weeks  that  Burns  could  be  spared  from  the 
work  of  the  farm,  where  he  was  already  doing  the 
work  of  a  man  ;  but  during  that  time,  so  eager  was  the 
pupil  to  learn,  and  so  willing  was  the  master  to  com- 
municate, that,  as  Murdoch  afterward  stated,  he  and 
his  boarder  were  hardly  a  moment  silent — the  one  enquir- 
ing, the  other  answering  and  expounding.  Among  other 
things  Murdoch  gave  him  a  start  in  learning  French  to 
such  effect  that  Burns  afterward  by  himself  acquired 
such  a  knowledge  of  the  language  that  he  was  able  to 
read  it  with  ease.  He  was  rather  proud,  in  fact,  of  the 
accomplishment,  and  fond  of  airing  scraps  of  French  in 
his  correspondence.  But  this  knowledge  of  French  was 
the  least  of  the  benefits  Burns  derived  from  this  inspir- 
ing and  stimulating  teacher. 

Looking  at  his  life  till  he  was  twenty-two  or  twenty- 
three,  we  find  from  a  memorandum-book  which  he  kept 
the  extent  of  his  reading,  and  we  may  safely  say  that 
there  were  very  few  young  men  at  that  time  in  any 
rank  whose  acquaintance  with  the  poets  of  the  previous 
century  was  so  great.  He  had  read  most  of  the  English 
poets,  including  Shakespeare,  Pope,  Shenstone,  Allan 
Ramsay,  and  collections  of  Scotch  songs  ;  and  he  not 
only  read  them,  but  pondered  over  them.  His  habit 
was  always  to  carry  a  book  in  his  pocket,  in  which  way 
he  is  said  to  have  worn  out  two  copies  of  Mackenzie's 
"Man  of  Feeling."  This  gives  us  a  clue  to  his  mode  of 
mental  application.  He  took  a  rigorously  critical  atti- 
tude. We  can  imagine  him  reading  over  his  songs,  then 
turning  the  work  over  in  his  mind  and  judging  with  his 
perfect  taste  whether  it  was  true  to  nature.  Burns  was 
wont  to  take  his  own  songs  to  pieces  ;  word  by  word, 
line  by  line,  stanza  by  stanza,  all  passed  under  review, 
and  were  critically  pronounced  on  by  their  author. 
There  could  be  no  greater  misconception  than  to  regard 


HOW    BURNS    PRODUCED    HIS    SONGS  163 

Burns  as  an  uneducated  poet.  This  idea  has  made  ship- 
wreck of  many  a  promising  poet,  or  at  least  of  many  a 
youth  capable  of  becoming  a  pleasing  versifier,  for  they 
get  the  idea  that  it  is  derogatoiy  to  poetic  genius  to 
take  intellectual  labor  over  their  verses.  They  are  under 
the  idea  that  Burns  produced  songs  without  considering 
whether  they  were  good  or  bad.  We  may  be  sure  that 
no  amount  of  genius  will  produce  perfect  art,  unless  the 
man  of  genius  will  bestow  intellectual  labor  on  it.  A 
perfect  poem,  such  as  many  of  Burns's  lyric  gems  are, 
can  no  more  be  written  without  labor  than  can  a  statue 
be  carved  out  of  stone. 


CHAPTER  XII 

WORDSWORTH 

CONNECTION  WITH  PREVIOUS  POETRY — SKETCH  OF  LD7E — LYRICAL 

BALLADS 

From  the  phrases  that  are  generally  used  about  nine- 
teenth-century poetry,  one  would  expect  to  be  conscious 
of  a  great  and  sudden  change  in  passing  into  it  out  of 
the  poetry  of  the  eighteenth  century.  Were  the  new 
poets  not  inspired  with  the  spirit  of  the  French  Revo- 
lution ?  Did  they  not  rise  in  their  might,  glowing  with 
a  noble  spirit  of  independence,  and  fling  the  poetic 
traditions  of  their  fathers  to  the  winds  ?  Pope  with 
his  mechanical  couplets,  his  passion  for  epigrammatic 
condensation,  his  fear  of  going  beyond  classical  example, 
was  sitting  on  poetry  like  a  nightmare  when  the  French 
Revolution  broke  out  ;  and  the  English  Muse,  fired  by 
this  great  modern  example  of  insubordination,  would 
bear  him  no  longer,  cast  off  her  old  Man  of  the  Moun- 
tain, and  roamed  greatly,  daring  wherever  Fancy  or 
Imagination  tempted,  with  all  the  fearless  ardor  of  new- 
found liberty.  Such  is  the  language  in  which  the  new 
movement  is  often  spoken  of,  and  if  we  accept  it  liter- 
ally, we  should  expect  to  find  somewhere  between  the 
old  poetry  and  the  new  a  sudden  discontinuous  break  ; 
we  should  expect,  as  we  followed  the  history  of  our 
literature,  to  encounter  all  of  a  sudden  the  signs  of  a 
great  and  complete  transformation  such  as  might  be 
made  on  the  face  of  nature  by  an  earthquake  or  a 
deluge.  But  no  such  catastrophic  spectacle  is  pre- 
sented to  the  historic  eye.  A  great  change  took  place, 
but  it  was  an  easy,  gradual  transition,  a  quiet  evolution 

164 


GRADUAL    REVOLUTION   IN   TASTE    FOR   POETRY      165 

of  new  things,  not  a  fierce  upheaval  and  sweeping  away 
of  old  things  as  worthless  rubbish,  and  a  triumphant 
reconstruction  upon  entirely  new  lines.  We  must  not 
ignore  the  fact  that  there  was  a  change  because  we  can- 
not put  our  finger  upon  the  exact  moment  when  the 
change  occurred  ;  but  it  is  equally  unhistoric  to  be  mis- 
led by  the  character  of  the  tremendous  political  event 
of  the  time  into  ascribing  a  similar  character  to  the 
grand  new  season  of  poetry  that  opened  with  the  nine- 
teenth century. 

The  hold  of  the  Queen  Anne  style  on  literature,  as 
we  have  seen,  relaxed  gradually;  the  sentiments  that 
it  embodied  gradually  palled  from  custom  on  the  class 
for  whom  Pope  wrote  ;  longings  for  new  excitements 
gradually  made  themselves  felt  ;  and  gradually  also  the 
class  whose  taste  had  dominated  Queen  Anne  literature 
lost  their  supremacy  in  the  world  of  art.  The  prosemen 
of  the  last  sixty  years  of  the  century  were,  as  I  have 
already  indicated,  the  chief  literary  agents  of  the  trans- 
formation that  gradually  evolved  itself,  year  by  year, 
ten  years  by  ten  years,  now  moving  quickly,  now  moving 
slowly.  The  novelists  and  the  romancers  educated  the 
taste  of  the  public  for  new  subjects  and  for  anew  style  ; 
for  subjects  of  more  various  human  interest,  and  a  style 
less  condensed  and  elaborate,  more  free  and  discursive. 
Pope's  readers  had  little  taste  for  romantic  marvels  or 
for  domestic  pathos  ;  the  romancers  and  the  novelists 
accustomed  the  public  to  such  imaginative  food,  and  so 
prepared  the  way  for  Scott  and  Wordsworth.  Even  the 
Byronic  spirit  had  its  prototype  in  prose. 

Wordsworth's  preface  to  his  "  Lyrical  Ballads "  in 
1798  is  a  great  landmark  in  the  history  of  poetry,  because 
it  woke  people  up  to  a  consciousness  of  the  change  that 
had  taken  place,  and  compelled  critics  to  define  their  posi- 
tion in  the  face  of  that  change.  This  preface,  and  the 
volume  with  which  it  is  connected,  we  must  consider  at 
length  ;  but  in  the  first  place  let  us  look  at  Wordsworth's 


166  WORDSWORTH 

early  life,  and  at  the  poems  written  by  him  before  the 
"  Lyrical  Ballads."  In  these  early  poems  we  shall  see 
how  gradual  was  his  transition  from  the  poetic  style  of 
his  predecessors,  notwithstanding  the  revolutionary  note 
of  his  famous  preface. 

To  some  of  Wordsworth's  admirers  it  might  appear  a 
sort  of  sacrilege  to  try  and  trace  the  growth  of  his  poetic 
style,  because  he  has  himself  in  the  "  Prelude"  written 
his  poetic  autobiography.  "  The  Growth  of  a  Poet's 
Mind  "  is  the  sub-title  of  this  wonderful  poem,  in  which 
flashes  of  poetic  rapture  are  so  strangely  mixed  with 
prosy  moralizings  and  pragmatic  dogmas  about  education. 
Seeing  that  the  poet  has  given  the  history  of  his  own 
mind,  it  is  to  his  worshippers  as  final  as  the  Koran  to  a 
good  Mohammedan  ;  and  any  presumptuous  attempt  to 
add  to  it  might  be  treated  by  them  as  the  books  in  the 
Alexandria  Library  were  treated  by  the  Caliph  Omar. 
They  might  say:  If  your  essay  contains  any  thing  not 
to  be  found  in  the  "  Prelude,"  it  is  wrong  ;  if  it  con- 
tains what  is  already  to  be  found  there,  it  is  superfluous. 
But  it  is  possible  to  go  beyond  the  revelation  of  the 
"  Prelude"  without  contradicting  it  or  merely  bringing 
to  light  what  is  useless  and  superfluous.  It  is  the  growth 
of  his  mind,  of  his  feelings,  of  his  impassioned  love  for 
Nature,  that  is  there  recorded  ;  not  the  growth  of  his 
poetic  art,  of  his  aims  and  methods  as  an  artist,  and 
these  are  interesting  to  us  if  we  wish  to  see  him  in  his 
right  relations  with  his  predecessors.  His  early  poems 
furnish  more  valuable  clues  for  this  enquiry  than  the 
"  Prelude,"  which  is  rather  an  imaginative  interpreta- 
tion of  his  youth  than  a  literal  record.  And  we  have 
other  clues  besides  in  his  singularly  matter-of-fact  prose 
notes  on  the  circumstances  in  which  he  composed  his 
early  poems. 

The  chief  incidents  in  Wordsworth's  early  life  were 
taken  down  from  his  own  dictation.  He  was  the  son  of 
one  of  Sir  James  Lowther's  land-agents,  wThose  head- 


Wordsworth's  early  life  107 

quarters  were  at  Cockermouth,  and  of  the  daughter  of 
a  mercer  in  Penrith.  His  early  boyhood  till  the  age  of 
nine  was  spent  partly  at  Cockermouth  and  partly  at 
Penrith,  both  beautifully  situated  little  towns  in  Cum- 
berland. From  nine  to  seventeen  he  was  at  a  boarding- 
school  in  Hawkshead,  another  romantically  situated 
little  town  in  the  north  of  Lancashire.  His  mother  died 
when  he  was  seven  years  old,  and  his  father  when  he 
was  thirteen  ;  but  his  uncle,  in  whose  guardianship  he 
was  left,  although  Lord  Lonsdale  had  borrowed  all  his 
father's  money  and  refused  to  pay  it  back, — the  repay- 
ment not  being  made  till  the  old  lord's  death  many 
years  afterward, — his  uncle  kept  both  him  and  his  brother 
at  school,  and  sent  them  both  to  Cambridge,  the  poet 
entering  in  1787,  his  seventeenth  year.  Wordsworth 
took  his  degree  in  1791,  travelled  for  some  time  in 
France  and  Italy,  lived  for  a  few  years  in  London, 
thought  of  the  Church  as  a  profession,  thought  of 
journalism  as  a  profession,  but  finally  decided  to  retire 
to  his  native  valleys  and  live  on  his  small  inheritance, 
devoting  his  days  to  "plain  living  and  high  thinking." 
He  was  nearly  thirty  when  he  took  this  determination, 
and  he  persevered  in  it  to  the  end  of  his  days  in  1850, 
with  the  addition  to  his  means  of  plain  living  of  a  Com- 
missionership  of  Stamps  in  1813,  and  a  pension  of  three 
hundred  pounds  in  1842. 

Such  is  the  bare  outline  of  Wordsworth's  life.  What 
were  the  ruling  circumstances  that  co-operated  with  in- 
born genius  to  make  him  the  poet  that  he  was  ?  Read 
the  "  Prelude  "  and  you  will  find  that  his  own  answer  is 
simply  Nature — the  mountains  and  the  mists,  and  the 
leaping  sounding  cataracts  of  the  valleys  where  he  lived 
in  youth.  This  is  how  he  describes  his  feelings  in  his 
school-days  at  Hawkshead  : 

"  I  would  walk  alone 
Under  the  quiet  stars,  and  at  that  time 
Have  felt  whate'er  there  is  of  power  in  sound 


168  WORDSWORTH 

To  breathe  an  elevated  mood,  by  form 
Or  image  unprofaned  ;  and  I  would  stand, 
If  the  night  blackened  with  a  coming  storm, 
Beneath  some  rock,  listening  to  notes  that  are 
The  ghostly  language  of  the  ancient  earth, 
Or  make  their  dim  abode  in  distant  winds. 
Thence  did  I  drink  the  visionary  power  ; 
And  deem  not  profitless  those  fleeting  moods 
Of  shadowy  exultation  ;  not  for  this, 
That  they  are  kindred  to  our  purer  mind 
And  intellectual  life  ;  but  that  the  soul, 
Remembering  not,  retains  an  obscure  sense 
Of  possible  sublimity,  whereto 
With  growing  faculties  she  doth  aspire, 
With  faculties  still  growing,  feeling  still 
That  whatsoever  point  they  gain,  they  yet 
Have  something  to  pursue." 

And  again  : 

"  'Twere  long  to  tell 
What  spring  and  autumn,  what  the  winter  snows, 
And  what  the  summer  shade,  what  day  and  night, 
Evening  and  morning,  sleep  and  waking,  thought 
From  sources  inexhaustible,  poured  forth 
To  feed  the  spirit  of  religious  love 
In  which  I  walked  with  Nature.     But  let  this 
Be  not  forgetten,  that  I  still  retained 
My  first  creative  sensibility  ; 
That  by  the  regular  action  of  the  world 
My  soul  was  unsubdued.     A  plastic  power 
Abode  with  me  ;  a  forming  hand,  at  times 
Rebellious,  acting  in  a  devious  mood  ; 
A  local  spirit  of  his  own,  at  war 
With  general  tendency,  but,  for  the  most, 
Subservient  strictly  to  external  things 
With  which  it  communed.     An  auxiliar  light 
Came  from  my  mind,  which  on  the  setting  sun 
Bestowed  new  splendour  ;  the  melodious  birds, 
The  fluttering  breezes,  fountains  that  run  on, 
Murmuring  so  sweetly  in  themselves,  obeyed 
A  like  dominion,  and  the  midnight  storm 
Grew  darker  in  the  presence  of  my  eye  : 
Hence  my  obeisance,  my  devotion  hence, 
And  hence  my  transport. 


NATURE'S    INFLUENCE    ON    WORDSWORTH  169 

Nor  should  this,  perchance, 
Pass  unrecorded,  that  I  still  had  loved 
The  exercise  and  produce  of  a  toil, 
Than  analytic  industry  to  me 
More  pleasing,  and  whose  character  I  deem 
Is  more  poetic  as  resembling  more 
Creative  agency.     The  song  would  speak 
Of  that  interminable  building  reared 
By  observation  of  affinities 
In  objects*where  no  brotherhood  exists 
To  passive  minds.     My  seventeenth  year  was  come  ! 
And,  whether  from  this  habit  rooted  now 
So  deeply  in  my  mind,  or  from  excess 
In  the  great  social  principle  of  life 
Coercing  all  things  into  sympathy, 
To  inorganic  natures  were  transferred 
My  own  enjoyments  ;  or  the  power  of  truth 
Coming  in  revelation  did  converse 
With  things  that  really  are,  I,  at  this  time, 
Saw  blessings  spread  around  me  like  a  sea. 
Thus  while  the  days  flew  by,  and  years  passed  on, 
From  Nature  and  her  overflowing  soul, 
I  had  received  so  much  that  all  my  thoughts 
Were  steeped  in  feeling  :  I  was  only  then 
Contented,  when  with  bliss  ineffable 
I  felt  the  sentiment  of  Being  spread 
O'er  all  that  moves  and  all  that  seemeth  still  ; 
O'er  all  that,  lost  beyond  the  reach  of  thought 
And  human  knowledge,  to  the  human  eye 
Invisible,  yet  liveth  to  the  heart ; 
O'er  all  that  leaps  and  runs,  and  shouts  and  sings, 
Or  beats  the  gladsome  air  ;  o'er  all  that  glides 
Beneath  the  wave,  yea,  in  the  wave  itself, 
And  mighty  depth  of  waters." 

At  Cambridge  he  attended  little  to  the  studies  of  the 
place.  "  He  began  residence  at  seventeen,"  says  Mr. 
Myers,  "  and  his  northern  nature  was  late  to  flower. 
There  seems,  in  fact,  to  have  been  even  less  of  visible 
promise  about  him  than  we  should  have  expected  ;  but 
rather  something  untamed  and  insubordinate,  some- 
thing heady  and  self-confident  ;  an  independence  that 


170  WORDSWORTH 

seemed  only  rusticity,  and  an  indolent  ignorance  which 
assumed  too  readily  the  tones  of  scorn."  But  his  mind 
was  not  idle  : 

"  Oft  when  the  dazzling  show  no  longer  new 
Had  ceased  to  dazzle,  ofttiraes  did  I  quit 
My  comrades,  leave  the  crowd,  buildings  and  groves, 
And  as  I  paced  alone  the  level  fields 
Far  from  those  lovely  sights  and  sounds^  sublime 
With  which  I  had  been  conversant,  the  mind 
Drooped  not ;  but  there  into  herself  returning, 
With  prompt  rebound  seemed  fresh  as  heretofore. 
At  least  I  more  distinctly  recognised 
Her  native  instincts  :  let  me  dare  to  speak 
A  higher  language,  say  that  now  I  felt 
What  independent  solaces  were  mine, 
To  mitigate  the  injurious  sway  of  place 
Or  circumstance,  how  far  soever  changed 
In  youth,  or  to  be  changed  in  after  years. 
As  if  awakened,  summoned,  roused,  constrained, 
I  looked  for  universal  things  ;  perused 
The  common  countenance  of  earth  and  sky  : 
Earth,  nowhere  unembellished  by  some  trace 
Of  that  first  Paradise  whence  man  was  driven  ; 
And  sky,  whose  beauty  and  bounty  are  expressed 
By  the  proud  name  she  bears— the  name  of  Heaven. 
I  called  on  both  to  teach  me  what  they  might  ; 
Or,  turning  the  mind  in  upon  herself, 
Pored,  watched,  expected,  listened,  spread  my  thoughts 
And  spread  them  with  a  wider  creeping  ;  felt 
Incumbencies  more  awful,  visitings 
Of  the  Upholder  of  the  tranquil  soul, 
That  tolerates  the  indignities  of  Time, 
And,  from  the  centre  of  Eternity 
All  finite  motions  overruling,  lives 
In  glory  immutable.     But  peace  !  enough 
Here  to  record  that  I  was  mounting  now 
To  such  community  with  highest  truth — 
A  track  pursuing,  not  untrod  before, 
From  strict  analogies  by  thought  supplied, 
Or  consciousnesses  not  to  be  subdued. 
To  every  natural  form,  rock,  fruit,  or  flower, 
Even  the  loose  stones  that  cover  the  highway, 


HIS   ABSORPTION    IN    NATURE  171 

I  gave  a  moral  life  :  I  saw  them  feel, 

Or  linked  them  to  some  feeling  :  the  great  mass 

Lay  bedded  in  a  quickening  soul,  and  all 

That  I  beheld  respired  with  inward  meaning. 

Add  that  whate'er  of  Terror  or  of  Love 

Or  Beauty,  Nature's  daily  face  put  on 

From  transitory  passion,  unto  this 

I  was  as  sensitive  as  waters  are 

To  the  sky's  influence  in  a  kindred  mood 

Of  passion  ;  was  obedient  as  a  lute 

That  waits  upon  the  touches  of  the  wind. 

Unknown,  unthought  of,  yet  was  I  most  rich — 

I  had  a  world  about  me— 'twas  my  own  ; 

I  made  it,  for  it  only  lived  to  me, 

And  to  the  God  who  sees  into  the  heart." 

Now,  how  were  the  poet's  sensibilities  thus  keenly- 
awakened  to  the  glories  and  the  beauties  of  Nature  ? 
What  first  made  him  alive  to  the  joy  of  poring  over 
every  shade  of  color,  every  minute  variation  of  form  in 
natural  things,  and  seeking  in  them,  with  never-ending 
satisfaction,  images  of  human  life  in  its  manifold  rela- 
tions ?  And  what  influences  governed  his  expression  of 
what  he  saw  and  felt?  The  "Prelude "is  silent  on 
these  points.  It  merely  chronicles  the  phases  of  his 
delight  in  looking  and  imagining.  There  was  in  Words- 
worth to  the  last  not  a  little  of  that  untamed  rustic 
egotism  which  Shakespeare  caricatured  in  Holofernes 
and  Sir  Andrew  Aguecheek  ;  the  egotism  which,  owing 
to  slight  contact  with  other  human  beings,  is  never  tired 
of  contemplating  the  strangeness  of  its  own  moods. 
"Iain  a  fellow  of  the  strangest  mind  in  the  world," 
said  Sir  Andrew,  and  in  these  words  expressed  an 
undying  characteristic  of  the  isolated  man  who  seldom 
makes  comparison  of  his  own  mind  with  the  minds  of 
his  fellow-creatures.  Wordsworth's  distinction  lay  not 
in  what  he  felt,  but  in  the  play  of  his  imagination  on 
what  he  felt.  He  magnifies  the  strangeness  of  his 
absorption  in  Nature  by  representing  it  as  a  mysterious, 
inexplicable  feat,  originating  he  knew  not  how,  but 
15 


172  WORDSWORTH 

present  with  him  from  his  earliest  years,  .and  gaining  no 
strength  but  from  its  own  impetus.  "  The  '  Prelude  ' 
is  a  work  of  good  augury  for  human  nature,"  Mr.  Myers 
says,  in  commenting  on  the  poem.  "  We  felt  in  reading 
it  as  if  the  stock  of  mankind  were  sound.  The  soul 
seems  going  on  from  strength  to  strength  by  the  mere 
development  of  her  inborn  power."  The  "  Prelude  "  is 
a  noble  poem,  but  this  particular  feature  of  it  I  should 
consider  a  weakness,  and  not  a  strength.  No  man  can 
stand  alone  ;  the  aspiration  to  do  so  is  as  inhuman  as 
the  achievement  is  impossible.  The  soul  that  seeks  to 
isolate  itself  from  its  fellows  must  infallibly  harden 
and  wither. 

When,  however,  we  turn  to  his  early  poems,  and  to 
his  prosaic  notes  and  illustrations  of  them,  we  can  see 
clearly  enough  the  continuity  of  his  descent  from  the 
great  poets  who  had  written  before  him. 

The  "  Evening  Walk  "  and  the  "  Descriptive  Sketches  " 
were  published  in  1793.  Commenting  many  years  after- 
ward on  the  couplet  : 

"And  fronting  the  bright  west,  yon  oak  entwines 
lis  darkening  boughs  and  leaves  in  stronger  lines," 

he  says  :  "  This  is  feebly  and  imperfectly  expressed  ; 
but  I  recollect  distinctly  the  very  spot  where  this  first 
struck  me.  It  was  on  the  way  between  Hawkshead  and 
Ambleside,  and  gave  me  extreme  pleasure.  The  moment 
was  important  in  my  poetical  history  ;  for  I  date  from 
it  my  consciousness  of  the  infinite  varietj^  of  natural 
appearances  which  had  been  unnoticed  by  the  poets  of 
any  age  or  country,  so  far  as  I  was  acquainted  with 
them;  and  I  made  a  resolution  to  supply  in  some  degree 
the  deficiency.  I  could  not  at  that  time  have  been  above 
fourteen  years  of  age."  There  was  more,  then,  than 
mere  disinterested  delight  in  the  poet's  contemplation 
of  Nature  ;  mingled  with  that  delight  was  a  poet's 
ambition,  and   the  joy  of  having  found  an   untrodden 


HIS    POETICAL   MASTERS  173 

track.  And  lie  did  not  qualify  himself  for  this  self- 
imposed  mission  by  mere  indolent  gazing  and  dreamy 
pursuit  of  the  thick-coming  fancies  that  crowded  his 
mind,  while  his  eye  drank  in  what  Nature  presented  to 
him.  If  the  "  Prelude  "  had  been  intended  as  a  plain 
historical  narrative  of  the  growth  of  a  poet's  mind,  it 
would  have  been  strange  that  he  does  not  mention  in 
the  description  of  his  Cambridge  life  an  incident  that 
connects  him  with  the  poet  Gray.  He  studied  Italian 
then,  and  his  teacher  was  Gray's  friend.  It  was  not, 
however,  from  the  Italian  poets  that  he  caught  the 
rhythm  of  his  early  style.  You  will  have  no  difficulty 
in  detecting  his  poetical  masters  if  I  read  you  a  passage 
or  two  from  the  "  Evening  Walk  "  and  the  "  Descriptive 
Sketches  "  : 

"  Sweet  are  the  sounds  that  mingle  from  afar, 
Heard  by  calm  lakes,  as  peeps  the  folding  star, 
When  the  duck  dabbles  'mid  the  rustling  sedge, 
And  feeding  pike  starts  from  the  water's  edge, 
Or  the  swan  stirs  the  reeds,  his  neck  and  bill 
Wetting,  that  drip  upon  the  water  still  ; 
And  heron,  as  resounds  the  trodden  shore, 
Shoots  upward,  darting  his  long  neck  before. 
Now,  with  religious  awe,  the  farewell  light 
Blends  with  the  solemn  colouring  of  night  ; 
'Mid  groves  of  clouds  that  crest  the  mountain's  brow, 
And  round  the  west's  proud  lodge  their  shadows  throw, 
Like  Una  shining  on  her  gloomy  way, 
The  half-seen  form  of  Twilight  roams  astray  ; 
Shedding,  through  paly  loopholes  mild  and  small, 
Gleams  that  upon  the  lake's  still  bosom  fall  ; 
Soft  o'er  the  surface  creep  those  lustres  pale, 
Tracking  the  motions  of  the  fitful  gale. 
With  restless  interchange  at  once  the  bright 
Wins  on  the  shade,  the  shade  upon  the  light. 
No  favoured  eye  was  e'er  allowed  to  gaze 
On  lovelier  spectacle  in  faery  days." 

Or  again  : 

"  Once,  Man  entirely  free,  alone  and  wild, 
Was  blest  as  free—for  he  was  Nature's  child. 


1*74  WORDSWORTH 

He,  all  superior  but  his  God  disdained, 
Walked  none  restraining,  and  by  none  restrained, 
Confessed  no  law  but  what  his  reason  taught, 
Did  all  he  wished,  and  wished  but  what  he  ought. 
As  man  in  his  primeval  dower  arrayed 
The  image  of  his  glorious  Sire  displayed, 
Even  so,  by  faithful  Nature  guarded,  here 
The  traces  of  primeval  Man  appear  ;  6 
The  simple  dignity  no  forms  debase  ; 
The  eye  sublime,  and  surly  lion-grace  : 
The  slave  of  none,  of  beasts  alone  the  lord, 
His  book  he  prizes,  nor  neglects  his  sword  ; 
Well  taught  by  that  to  feel  his  rights,  prepared 
With  this  'the  blessings  he  enjoys  to  guard.'" 

The  former  of  these  passages  reminds  one  of  Gold- 
smith as  forcibly  as  of  Pope,  but  in  the  latter  Pope 
alone  is  clearly  the  model.  There  is  an  evident  effort 
after  balance  and  condensed  expression,  but  it  is  not 
executed  with  nearly  the  perfection  and  terseness  of  the 
Popian  couplet.  The  imitation  is,  however,  sufficiently 
apparent  to  be  well  worth  noting  as  an  interesting  link 
between  the  two  poets. 

Wordsworth's  next  publication  was  the  "  Lyrical 
Ballads,"  in  1798.  The  volume  was  published  in  con- 
junction with  Coleridge.  Coleridge  visited  Words- 
worth in  the  summer  of  1797,  when  he  had  resided  with 
his  sister  at  Racedown  in  Dorsetshire.  By  this  time 
Wordsworth  had  written  his  poem  "  Guilt  and  Sorrow  " 
in  the  Spenserian  stanza  ;  his  tragedy  of  "  The  Bor- 
derers"; and  the  description  of  the  "Ruined  Cottage." 
I  mention  these  poems  because  it  is  a  significant  fact 
that  every  poem  written  by  Wordsworth  up  to  the  time 
of  Coleridge's  visit,  while  they  show  considerable  poetic 
power,  gave  little  indication  of  distinctive  individual 
genius.  This  visit  seems  to  have  had  a  wonderfully 
quickening  and  awakening  effect  on  Wordsworth's 
"nature.  The  two  young  men  were  charmed  with  one 
another,   and   Wordsworth    removed   to    Alfoxden    in 


THE  "lyrical  ballads"  1*75 

Somersetshire  to  enjoy  his  friend's  companionship. 
Daring  the  year  that  followed  he  produced  much,  and 
what  he  produced  hore  a  distinctive  mark,  as  if  the 
radiant,  restless  vitality  of  the  more  variously  gifted 
man  had  stirred  his  more  sluggish  northern  nature  to  its 
depths,  stimulated  him  to  put  forth  his  full  powers,  and 
made  him  feel  in  the  exercise  of  them  a  confident  sense 
of  mastery.  It  may  truly  be  said  that  Wordsworth 
hardly  knew  what  was  in  him  till  the  companionship  of 
Coleridge  widened  the  horizon  of  his  aims. 

The  volume  published  at  Bristol  in  1798  contained 
Coleridge's  "  Ancient  Mariner";  the  rest  of  the  volume 
was  by  Wordsworth.  In  the  authorized  edition  of  his 
works  no  chronological  order  is  followed  ;  they  are 
classified  according  to  subjects  ;  and  it  is  important,  if  we 
would  understand  the  controversy  that  has  been  raised 
round  Wordsworth's  name,  that  we  should  pick  out  and 
read  together  the  poems  that  were  published  together  in 
1798.  "We  are  Seven"  is  now  included  among  the 
"  Poems  referring  to  the  period  of  Childhood  "  (No.  x)  ; 
"The  Complaint""  (21),  "The  Last  of  the  Flock"  (22), 
"The  Idiot  Boy"  (31),  and  "  Her  Eyes  are  Wild  "  (37), 
among  the  "  Poems  Founded  on  the  Affections  ";  "The 
Reverie  of  Poor  Susan"  (13),  "The  Thorn"  (23), 
"  Lines  above  Tintern  Abbey  "  (26),  among  "Poems  of 
the  Imagination";  "Expostulation  and  Reply"  (1), 
"The  Tables  Turned"  (2),  "  To  my  Sister"  (5),  and 
"Simon  Lee"  (6),  among  "Poems  of  Sentiment  and 
Reflection";  "Goody  Blake  and  Harry  Gill,"  among 
"  Miscellaneous  Poems." 

When  these  poems  are  read  together,  we  begin  to 
understand  why  such  a  shout  of  derision  was  raised  by 
the  critics  against  the  "  Lyrical  Ballads,"  and  why  they 
impressed  so  deeply  those  who  were  not  repelled  by 
their  strangeness.  The  poet's  personality  was  power- 
fully expressed  in  them,  and  he  was  a  markedly  differ- 
ent kind  of  person  from  any  that  had  before  presented 


IV  6  WORDSWORTH 

himself  as  a  poet.  His  humor  was  a  strange  kind  of 
humor,  and  his  seriousness  ran  in  an  unusual  vein,  and 
humor  and  seriousness  were  strangely  intermixed.  The 
public  found  subjects  that  they  were  accustomed  to  con- 
sider too  vulgar  and  common  for  poetry  treated  appar- 
ently with  pathetic  intention,  but  in  so  grotesque  a  way 
as  only  to  make  them  laugh  at  the  attempt  on  their 
tender  feelings.  There  was,  indeed,  one  poem  in  the 
volume,  the  "Lines  written  above  Tintern  Abbey,"  in 
which  a  fresh  theme  was  handled  with  a  power  that 
nobody  could  be  insensible  to.  If  all  had  been  like 
this,  the  acknowledgment  of  Wordsworth's  greatness 
would  not  have  been  checked  and  held  back  by  astonish- 
ment at  the  grotesque  strangeness  of  the  lyrical  ballads, 
to  which  the  title  of  the  volume  challenged  special 
attention.  This  was  the  poem  in  which  he  first  gave 
expression  to  his  impassioned  worship  of  Nature  : 

"  Five  years  have  past ;  five  summers,  with  the  length 
Of  five  long  winters  !  and  again  I  hear 
These  waters,  rolling  from  their  mountain  springs 
With  a  soft  inland  murmur. — Once  again 
Do  I  behold  these  steep  and  lofty  cliffs, 
That  on  a  wild  secluded  scene  impress 
Thoughts  of  more  deep  seclusion  ;  and  connect 
The  landscape  with  the  quiet  of  the  sky. 
The  day  has  corne  when  I  again  repose 
Here,  under  this  dark  sycamore,  and  view 
These  plots  of  cottage-ground,  these  orchard-tufts, 
"Which  at  this  season,  with  their  unripe  fruits, 
Are  clad  in  one  green  hue,  and  lose  themselves 
'Mid  groves  and  copses.     Once  again  I  see 
These  hedge-rows,  hardly  hedge-rows,  little  lines 
Of  sportive  wood  run  wild  ;  these  pastoral  farms, 
Green  to  the  very  door  ;  and  wreaths  of  smoke 
Sent  up,  in  silence,  from  among  the  trees  ! 
With  some  uncertain  notice,  as  might  seem 
Of  vagrant  dwellers  in  the  houseless  woods, 
Or  of  some  Hermit's  cave,  where  by  his  fire 
The  Hermit  sits  alone. 


abbey"      177 

These  beauteous  forms, 
Through  a  long  absence,  have  not  been  to  me 
As  is  a  landscape  to  a  blind  man's  eye  : 
But  oft  in  lonely  rooms,  and  'mid  the  din 
Of  towns  and  cities,  I  have  owed  to  them 
In  hours  of  weariness  sensations  sweet, 
Felt  in  the  blood,  and  felt  along  the  heart ; 
And  passing  even  into  my  purer  mind, 
With  tranquil  restoration  : — feelings  too 
Of  unremembered  pleasure  :  such,  perhaps, 
As  have  no  slight  or  trivial  influence 
On  that  best  portion  of  a  good  man's  life, 
His  little,  nameless,  unremembered  acts 
Of  kindness  and  of  love.     Nor  less,  I  trust, 
To  them  I  may  have  owed  another  gift, 
Of  aspect  more  sublime  ;  that  blessed  mood, 
In  which  the  burthen  of  the  mystery, 
In  which  the  heavy  and  the  weary  weight 
Of  all  this  unintelligible  world, 
Is  lightened  :— that  serene  and  blessed  mood, 
In  which  the  affections  gently  lead  us  on, — 
Until,  the  breath  of  this  corporeal  frame 
And  even  the  motion  of  our  human  blood 
Almost  suspended,  we  are  laid  asleep 
In  body,  and  become  a  living  soul  : 
While  with  an  eye  made  quiet  by  the  power 
Of  harmony,  and  the  deep  power  of  joy, 
We  see  into  the  life  of  things.     If  this 
Be  but  a  vain  belief,  yet,  oh!  how  oft — 
In  darkness  and  amid  the  many  shapes 
Of  joyless  daylight ;  when  the  fretful  stir 
Unprofitable,  and  the  fever  of  the  world, 
Have  hung  upon  the  beatings  of  my  heart — 
How  oft,  in  spirit,  have  I  turned  to  thee, 
O  sylvan  Wye  !  thou  wanderer  thro'  the  woods, 
How  often  has  my  spirit  turned  to  thee  ! 

And  now,  with  gleams  of  half-extinguished  thoughts, 
With  many  recognitions  dim  and  faint, 
And  somewhat  of  a  sad  perplexity, 
The  picture  of  the  mind  revives  again  : 
While  here  I  stand,  not  only  with  the  sense 
Of  present  pleasure,  but  with  pleasing  thoughts 
That  in  this  moment  there  is  life  and  food 
For  future  years.    And  so  I  dare  to  hope, 


178  WORDSWORTH 

Though  changed,  no  doubt,  from  what  I  was  when  first 

I  came  among  these  hills  ;  when  like  a  roe 

I  bounded  o'er  the  mountains,  by  the  sides 

Of  the  deep  rivers,  and  the  lonely  streams, 

Wherever  nature  led  :  more  like  a  man 

Flying  from  something  that  he  dreads,  than  one 

Who  sought  the  thing  he  loved.     For  nature  then 

(The  coarser  pleasures  of  my  boyish  days, 

And  their  glad  animal  movements  all  gone  by) 

To  me  was  all  in  all  ;— I  cannot  paint 

What  then  I  was.     The  sounding  cataract 

Haunted  me  like  a  passion  ;  the  tall  rock, 

The  mountain,  and  the  deep  and  gloomy  wood, 

Their  colours  and  their  forms,  were  then  to  me 

An  appetite  ;  a  feeling  and  a  love, 

That  had  no  need  of  a  remoter  charm, 

By  thought  supplied,  nor  any  interest 

Unborrowed  from  the  eye.— That  time  is  past, 

And  all  its  aching  joys  are  now  no  more, 

And  all  its  dizzy  raptures.     Not  for  this 

Faint  I,  nor  mourn  nor  murmur  ;  other  gifts 

Have  followed  ;  for  such  loss,  I  would  believe, 

Abundant  recompeuce.    For  I  have  learned 

To  look  on  nature,  not  as  in  the  hour 

Of  thoughtless  youth  ;  but  hearing  oftentimes 

The  still,  sad  music  of  humanity, 

Not  harsh,  nor  grating,  though  of  ample  power 

To  chasten  and  subdue.     And  I  have  felt 

A  presence  that  disturbs  me  with  the  joy 

Of  elevated  thoughts  ;  a  sense  sublime 

Of  something  far  more  deeply  interfused, 

Whose  dwelling  is  the  light  of  setting  suns, 

And  the  round  ocean  and  the  living  air, 

And  the  blue  sky,  and  in  the  mind  of  man  ; 

A  motion  and  a  spirit,  that  impels 

All  thinking  things,  all  objects  of  all  thought, 

And  rolls  through  all  things.     Therefore  am  I  still 

A  lover  of  the  meadows  and  the  woods 

And  mountains  ;  and  of  all  that  we  behold 

From  this  green  earth  ;  of  all  the  mighty  world 

Of  eye,  and  ear,— both  what  they  half  create, 

And  what  perceive  ;  well  pleased  to  recognise 

In  nature  and  the  language  of  the  sense, 

The  anchor  of  my  purest  thoughts,  the  nurse, 


"lines  written  above  tintekn  abbey"      179 

The  guide,  the  guardian  of  my  heart,  and  soul 
Of  all  my  moral  being. 

Nor  perchance, 
If  I  were  not  thus  taught,  should  I  the  more 
Suffer  my  genial  spirits  to  decay  : 
For  thou  art  with  me  here  upon  the  banks 
Of  this  fair  river  ;  thou  my  dearest  friend, 
My  dear,  dear  friend  ;  and  in  thy  voice  I  catch 
The  language  of  my  former  heart,  and  read 
My  former  pleasures  in  the  shooting  lights 
Of  thy  wild  eyes.     Oh  !  yet  a  little  while 
May  I  behold  in  thee  what  I  was  once, 
My  dear,  dear  Sister  !  and  this  prayer  I  make, 
Knowing  that  Nature  never  did  betray 
The  heart  that  loved  her  :  'tis  her  privilege 
Through  all  the  years  of  this  our  life,  to  lead 
From  joy  to  joy  ;  for  she  can  so  inform 
The  mind  that  is  within  us,  so  impress 
With  quietness  and  beauty,  and  so  feed 
"With  lofty  thoughts,  that  neither  evil  tongues, 
Rash  judgments,  nor  the  sneers  of  selfish  men, 
Nor  greetings  where  no  kindness  is,  nor  all 
The  dreary  intercourse  of  daily  life, 
Shall  e'er  prevail  against  us,  or  disturb 
Our  cheerful  faith,  that  all  which  we  behold 
Is  full  of  blessings.     Therefore  let  the  moon 
Shine  on  thee  in  thy  solitary  walk  ; 
And  let  the  misty  mountain  winds  be  free 
To  blow  against  thee  :  and,  in  after  years, 
"When  these  wild  ecstasies  shall  be  matured 
Into  a  sober  pleasure  ;  when  thy  mind 
Shall  be  a  mansion  for  all  lovely  forms, 
Thy  memory  be  as  a  dwelling-place 
For  all  sweet  sounds  and  harmonies  ;  oh  !  then, 
If  solitude,  or  fear,  or  pain,  or  grief, 
Should  be  thy  portion,  with  what  healing  thoughts 
Of  tender  joy  wilt  thou  remember  me, 
And  these  my  exhortations  !    Nor,  perchance, 
If  I  should  be  where  I  no  more  can  hear 
Thy  voice,  nor  catch  from  thy  wild  eyes  these  gleams 
Of  past  existence — wilt  thou  then  forget 
That  on  the  banks  of  this  delightful  stream 
We  stood  together  ;  and  that  I,  so  long 
A  worshipper  of  nature,  hither  came 


180  WORDSWORTH 

Unwearied  in  that  service  :  rather  say 

With  warmer  love— oh  !  with  far  deeper  zeal 

Of  holier  love.     Nor  wilt  thou  then  forget, 

That  after  many  wanderings,  many  years 

Of  absence,  these  steep  woods  and  lofty  cliffs, 

And  this  green  pastoral  landscape,  were  to  me 

More  dear,  both  for  themselves  and  for  thy  sake  !  " 

This   poem  is   characteristic   of  the   loftiest  side  of 
Wordsworth's  genius.     In  it  he  struck  for  the  first  time 
the  sublime  note  that  has  drawn  men  after  him  as  the 
prophet  of    a  new  delight,    a  full-voiced    speaker    of 
things  that  all  feel  dimly  and  vaguely,  but  which  no 
poet  before  him  had  expressed  with  such   force.     But 
mark,  as  confirming  what  I  have  said  about  the  gradual 
character  of  transitions  in  poetry,  that  both  the  rhythm 
of    Wordsworth's  lines  and  the    feeling  expressed  are 
developments   from   Cowper.      The   level  Ouse  flowed 
through  a  flatter  landscape  than  the  Denvent,  and  there 
was  a  fire  and  majesty  in  Wordsworth's  stronger  spirit 
that  we  look  for  in  vain  in  the  gentle  Cowper.     But  the 
direction   of  their  feelings  was  the  same  ;  the  rhythm 
of  their  verse  had  much  in  common  ;    Wordsworth's 
torch  was  kindled  at  Cowper's.     "  A  great  poet  creates 
the  taste  by  which  he  is    enjoyed,"  Wordsworth  said, 
and  the  saying  is  often   repeated.     But  it  is  isolating 
him  too  much  to  sav  that  he  created  the  taste  that  en- 
joyed  his  Nature  poetry.     We   can    believe  this  only 
when  we  ignore  all  that  happened  in  the  half  century 
between  Pope's  death  and  the  appearance  of  the  "  Lyri- 
cal Ballads." 

No  :  the  current  formula  that  Wordsworth  created 
the  taste  by  which  he  is  enjoyed  is  only  a  half  or  a 
quarter  truth.  The  currency  that  the  saying  has 
obtained  is  due  chiefly  to  a  vague  impression,  such  as 
often  arises  when  the  facts  of  history  are  mingled 
together  and  fancifully  rearranged  in  the  popular 
memory — a  vague   impression  that   all   Wordsworth's 


HOSTILE    RECEPTION    OF    "  LYK1CAL    BALLADS  "       181 

poetry  was  received  with  a  howl  of  derision  and  ridi- 
cule when  first  submitted  to  the  public.  There  were 
three  veins  in  one  volume — "Tintern  Abbey  Lines," 
"Guilt  and  Sorrow,"  and  the  "  Lyrical  Ballads."  Now, 
it  was  not  against  what  is  commonly  understood  by  his 
Nature  poetiy, — such  poetry  as  I  have  quoted, — that  the 
storm  was  directed,  but  against  some  of  his  lyrical 
ballads,  strictly  so  called  :  "  The  Idiot  Boy,"  "  Goody 
Blake,"  and  "The  Thorn."  And  the  storm  did  not 
become  loud  and  lonsr  till  Wordsworth  not  onlv 
defended  these  poems  in  his  famous  Preface,  but  with 
aggressive  obstinacy  maintained  that  all  true  poetry 
must  be  composed  on  the  same  principles.  Further, 
though  the  storm  against  these  poems  has  long  since 
subsided  into  a  calm,  the  taste  for  them  has  not  yet 
been  created.  Even  Mr.  Myers  admits  that  "The 
Thorn,"  "The  Idiot  Boy,"  and  "Goody  Blake  and 
Harry  Gill"  have  been  "justly  blamed  for  triviality." 
As  I  am  one  of  the  few  who  do  not  agree  with  this  ver- 
dict, having  a  natural  taste  for  such  grotesque  mix- 
tures of  pathos  and  rough  humor, — a  taste  not  created 
by  Wordsworth,  but  more  probably  by  a  bucolic  up- 
bringing,— I  am  all  the  less  likely  to  be  biassed  in  the 
admission  that  the  taste  is  not  general. 

These  lyrical  ballads,  which  owed  their  origin  to  an 
accident,  are  certainly  strange  and  original,  fully 
colored  by  the  poet's  individuality.  The  idea  of  writ- 
ing them  probably  occurred  to  Wordsworth  when  he 
was  conversing  with  Coleridge  over  the  German  imita- 
tions of  Percy's  old  English  ballads.  The  idea  of 
writing  the  "  Ancient  Mariner  "  occurred  in  the  course 
of  the  same  companionship,  and  the  difference  between 
them  and  the  "  Mariner  "  represents  the  difference  in 
individual  character  between  Wordsworth  and  Cole- 
ridge. The  two  friends  began  writing  the  "Mariner" 
together,  but  their  Conceptions  were  so  different  that 
Wordsworth  left  Coleridge  to  finish  it. 


CHAPTER  XIII 
wordsworth — continued 

"THE  IDIOT    BOY" — PROSE   V.    POETRY — COLERIDGE    ON  "WORDS- 
WORTH 

If  you  have  read  some  of  the  lyrical  ballads  to  which 
I  directed  you,  you  will  not,  I  think,  be  surprised  that 
they  appeared  trivial,  absurd,  and  even  repulsive  to  the 
generality  of  readers  of  poetry  when  first  they  made 
their  appearance.  The  wonder,  rather,  is  that  they 
found  as  many  readers  as  they  did,  for  though  many 
mocked,  a  considerable  number  read  them,  as  appears 
from  the  fact  that  a  second  edition  was  called  for  in 
1800.  This  could  hardly  have  been  the  case  if  the  vein 
of  sentiment  had  been  altogether  new  in  literature. 
Sensibility  to  the  joys  and  sorrows  of  humble  folk,  a 
disposition  never  entirely  absent  from  civilized  com- 
munities, we  may  well  believe,  had  been  deliberately 
cultivated  during  the  latter  part  of  the  eighteenth  cen- 
tury as  an  artistic  motive.  A  whole  school  of  prose 
fiction  ministered  to  this  sentiment,  the  most  prominent 
examples  of  which  are  Sterne's  "Tristram  Shandy"  and 
"Sentimental  Journey,"  where  the  sentiment  appears 
casually,  and  Mackenzie's  "  Man  of  Feeling,"  where  it 
is  the  dominant  feeling.  Universal  sympathy,  tender 
interest  in  every-thing  that  lives  and  moves,  was  the 
note  of  this  school.  Burns  wore  out  two  copies  of  the 
"  Man  of  Feeling"  carrying  it  about  in  his  pocket ;  and 
it  doubtless  helped  to  awaken  and  foster  in  him  the 
tenderness  of  heart  that  inspired  his  "  Address  to  the 
Mouse."  Sensibility,  in  fact,  pervaded  literature  dur- 
ing the  last  forty  years  of  the  century,  and  the  tender 

182 


HOW    WORDSWORTH    CAME    TO    WRITE    I5ALLADS       183 

experiences  of  Betty  FoAr,  the  mother  of  the  Idiot  Boy, 
would  have  commended  themselves  from  the  mere  force 
of  literary  custom  to  thousands  of  readers,  if  dressed  to 
advantage  in  the  familiar  sentimental  prose  style.  And, 
although  Wordsworth's  style  was  not  the  familiar  style, 
the  taste  for  the  kind  of  subject  at  least  had  been  culti- 
vated before  his  day. 

The  story  of  the  accident  that  led  Wordsworth  to 
write  ballads  on  subjects  taken  from  common  life  is 
well  known,  and  was  put  on  record  by  himself  in  a  note 
to  the  "  Idiot  Boy."  In  the  spring  of  1798,  when  he 
and  Coleridge  were  near  neighbors  and  close  friends, 
they  proposed  making  a  walking  tour  together,  and 
to  meet  the  expense  it  occurred  to  them  to  write 
together  a  ballad  by  the  way  and  send  it  to  the  New 
Monthly  3Iagazine.  The  poem  of  the  "  Ancient 
Mariner"  was  the  result.  Wordsworth  made  a  few 
suggestions  and  contributed  a  few  lines,  but,  as  he  says, 
"  as  we  endeavored  to  proceed  conjointly  (I  speak  of  the 
same  evening)  our  respective  manners  proved  so  different 
that  it  would  have  been  quite  presumptuous  in  me  to 
do  any  thing  but  separate  from  an  undertaking  upon 
which  I  could  have  been  only  a  clog."  He  proceeded 
instead  to  write  independently  tyrical  ballads  "on 
natural  subjects,  taken  from  common  life,  but  looked  at, 
as  far  as  micrht  be,  through  an  imaginative  medium." 
The  difference  between  the  "Lyrical  Ballads"  and  the 
"Ancient  Mariner "  represents  the  difference  in  indi- 
vidual character  and  history  between  Coleridge  and 
Wordsworth.  Ideas  work  themselves  out  differently 
according  to  the  minds  in  which  they  take  root. 

Wordsworth  was  country-bred,  familiar  only  with  the 
simple  folk  of  the  Northern  dales  till  he  was  seventeen; 
and  his  experience  of  towns  and  townspeople  did  not 
evoke  new  sympathies  to  supplant  the  old.  It  was  not 
merely  the  face  of  inanimate  nature  that  had  charms  for 
him.     He  had  the  keenest  sympathy  with  his  humble 


184  WORDSWORTH 

country  neighbors.  The  simple  incidents  of  their  lives 
interested  him  as  much  as  they  interested  the  humblest 
gossip  in  the  hamlet  or  in  the  hill-side  cottage,  though 
in  a  different  way.  His  imagination  fastened  on  these 
incidents,  and  transfigured  them.  Consider,  for  example, 
the  incidents  of  the  "The  Idiot  Boy"  as  they  would 
present  themselves  to  an  ordinary  village  gossip,  and 
you  will  understand  Wordsworth's  theory  about  the 
creative  function  of  the  poet : 

"  Imagination  needs  must  stir, 
Dear  maid,  this  truth  believe, 
Minds  that  have  little  to  confer 
Find  little  to  perceive." 

Old  Betty  Foy,  who  lives  in  the  same  house  with  Susan 
Gale,  has  an  only  child,  Johnny,  an  idiot,  whom  she 
loves  with  all  her  heart.  Susan  falls  ill,  and  Betty 
mounts  her  poor  boy  on  a  pony  and  sends  him  for  the 
doctor.  The  boy  does  not  return.  Betty  is  alarmed 
and  goes  in  search  of  him  ;  finds  him  after  a  long  search 
in  a  vale  staring  at  the  stars  and  listening  to  the  hoot- 
ing of  the  owls,  perfectly  delighted  with  them  and  him- 
self. Susan  meantime,  left  alone,  gets  anxious  in  her 
turn,  ceases  to  feel  her  ailments,  gets  up  and  hobbles 
after,  and  the  two  old  women,  delighted  with  the 
recovery  of  Johnny,  forget  all  about  the  illness,  and 
bring  him  home  in  merry  triumph.  That  is  all  the 
story  of  the  Idiot  Boy.  To  most  people  it  must  always 
appear  trivial,  yet  when  Wordsworth  heard  of  the  inci- 
dent it  haunted  his  imagination.  He  pictured  to  himself 
the  Idiot  Boy's  delight  when  he  was  put  on  horseback, 
the  mother's  pride  that  he  could  be  of  some  use,  the 
fears  that  came  over  her  as  hour  after  hour  passed  and 
neither  he  nor  the  doctor  came,  her  growing  impatience, 
herwijd  agitated  search  in  the  moonlight,  and  her  over- 
flowing joy  when  at  last  she  found  the  truant.  Every 
stanza  in  the  poem  is  a  vivid  picture  of  simple  human 


MRS.  oliphant's  criticisms  185 

feeling,  delightful  if  you  have  any  interest  in  the 
motherly  feelings  of  such  a  poor  old  woman  as  Betty 
Foy.  But  we  cannot  he  surprised  that  so  few  entered 
into  the  spirit  of  Wordsworth's  .imagination.  Even 
now,  when  his  fame  is  established,  and  it  is  customary 
to  denounce  the  purblind  critics  who  ridiculed  his  first 
publication,  we  find  "  The  Idiot  Boy  "  generally  given 
up  as  a  mistaken  experiment.  Wordsworth  uninten- 
tionally took  a  sweeping  revenge  on  those  early  critics 
when  he  rearranged  his  poems  so  that  their  chronological 
order  cannot  be  followed  without  some  trouble  ;  for 
many  people  now  loathe  and  detest  and  reprobate  their 
memory  who  entirely  agree  with  them.  Mrs.  Oli- 
phant, — who,  although  she  uses  the  now  orthodox 
language  against  the  worthless  critics  who  sneered 
at  the  "Lyrical  Ballads" — the  literary  gladiators 
who  fleshed  their  swords  upon  Wordsworth's  first 
efforts, — condemns  without  knowing  it  the  very  poems 
that  they  condemned,  and,  in  language  equally  strong, 
makes  a  comparison  between  "  The  Idiot  Boy "  and 
"John  Gilpin,"  very  much  to  the  disadvantage  of  the 
former.  "  The  choice  of  such  colloquial  familiarity  of 
treatment,"  she  says,  "as  suggests  a  jocular  rather  than 
a  serious  meaning,  the  absolute  insignificance  of  the 
incident,  and  the  absence  of  any  attempt  to  give  grace 
and  dignity  to  the  story,  balked  its  effect  completely  as 
an  exposition  of  nature,  while  the  humor  in  it  Avas  too 
feeble,  too  diffuse,  to  give  it  a  lively  comic  interest. 
Cowper  had  ventured  to  be  quite  as  colloquial  and 
realistic  in  '  John  Gilpin,'  with  electrical  effect."  The 
comparison  between  "  The  Idiot  Boy "  and  "  John 
Gilpin  "  is  not  a  happy  one,  for  the  two  poems  are  in 
very  different  keys  of  humor  :  we  are  expected  by  the 
poet  in  the  one  case  to  smile  with  moist  eyes  and  heart 
profoundly  touched,  and  in  the  other  to  laugh  heartily. 
Mrs.  Oliphant  complains  of  "  the  absolute  insignifi- 
cance of  the  incident,"  and  "  the  absence  of  any  attempt 


186  WORDSWORTH 

to  give  grace  and  dignity  to  the  story."  While  such 
complaints  are  made  by  professed  admirers  of  Words- 
worth, who  find  no  words  too  hard  for  the  injustice 
done  him  by  the  contemporary  critics  of  the  "  Lyrical 
Ballads,"  how  can  Wordsworth  be  said  to  have  created 
the  taste  by  which  he  is  enjoyed  ?  His  admirers  now 
repeat  the  same  criticisms  of  the  same  works.  It  was  in 
defence  of  himself  against  such  complaints  as  are  made 
by  Mrs.  Oliphant  and  Mr.  Myers  that  Wordsworth  wrote 
his  celebrated  Preface.  There  are  two  passages  from 
this  Preface  that  are  very  often  repeated  :  one  that  the 
language  used  in  poetry  should  be  the  language  really 
used  by  men,  and  the  other  that  poetry  is  the  sponta- 
neous overflow  of  powerful  feeling — that  it  takes  its 
origin  from  emotion  recollected  in  tranquillity.  These 
two  dicta  have  passed  into  literature  as  the  quintessence 
of  Wordsworth's  poetical  theory,  and  they  fit  in  with 
the  current  conception  of  Wordsworth  as  the  leader  of 
the  revolution  against  the  poetical  theories  of  the  eigh- 
teenth century.  But  the  Preface,  as  you  will  see  if  you 
read  the  whole  of  it,  was  much  more  limited  in  its  pur- 
pose ;  it  was  apologetic,  and  not  constructive  ;  it  was 
really  an  elaborate  justification  of  his  own  practice  in 
the  case  of  the  lyrical  ballads,  not  the  enunciation  of  a 
universally  binding  poetic  creed,  although  Wordsworth, 
not  the  meekest  of  men,  was  inclined  to  take  the  aggres- 
sive against  what  his  critics  considered  good  poetry. 
We  must  read  the  Preface  along  with  "  The  Idiot  Boy," 
"  The  Thorn,"  "  Goody  Blake,"  "  Peter  Bell,"  and  other 
ballads  of  the  same  class,  if  we  would  understand  its 
purport.  As  the  meaning  of  the  theory  that  the  lan- 
guage of  poetry  should  be  the  language  really  used  by 
men — a  theory  that  every-body  has  heard  of  that  has 
ever  heard  of  the  name  of  Wordsworth,  as  the  meaning 
of  this  theory  is  not  very  generally  understood — it  may 
be  worth  while  to  recall  what  Wordsworth  actually 
did  say. 


RUSTIC    LANGUAGE    IN   POETRY  187 

"The  principal  object  proposed  in  these  poems  [the  "Lyrical 
Ballads"|  was  to  choose  incidents  and  situations  from  common 
life,  and  to  relate  and  describe  them,  throughout,  as  far  as  was  possi- 
ble, in  a  selection  of  language  really  used  by  men,  and,  at  the  same 
time,  to  throw  over  them  a  certain  colouring  of  imagination, 
whereby  ordinary  things  should  be  presented  to  the  mind  in  an  un- 
usual aspect;  and  further,  and  above  all,  to  make  these  incidents 
and  associations  interesting  by  tracing  in  them,  truly  though  not 
ostentatiously,  the  primary  laws  of  our  nature,  chiefly  as  far  as 
regards  the  manner  in  "which  we  associate  ideas  in  a  state  of  ex- 
citement." 

It  is  commonly  supposed  that  by  the  language  really 
used  by  men  Wordsworth  meant  colloquial  language, 
above  all,  for  poetic  purposes,  the  language  of  rustics  ; 
and,  seeing  that  the  vocabulary  of  an  ordinary  peasant 
is  extremely  limited,  the  theory  has  been  laughed  at  as 
a  preposterous  limitation  of  poetry.  But  Wordsworth 
did  not  realty  propose  any  thing  so  absurd  as  this.  He 
did,  indeed,  defend  the  choice  for  poetry  of  themes 
from  rustic  life  and  language  from  rustic  life,  because 
"  the  essential  passions  of  the  heart  find  a  better  soil  in 
which  they  can  attain  their  maturity,  are  less  under 
restraint,  and  speak  a  plainer  and  more  emphatic  lan- 
guage"; and  because  peasants  "hourly  communicate  with 
the  best  objects  from  which  the  best  part  of  language  is 
originally  derived,"  and  "  from  their  rank  in  life,  and 
the  sameness  and  narrow  circle  of  their  intercourse, being 
less  under  the  influence  of  social  vanity,  they  convey 
their  feelings  and  notions  in  simple  and  unelaborated 
expressions."  In  this  overstrained  argument  in  his  own 
defence  Wordsworth  undoubtedly  went  too  far,  and  ex- 
posed himself  to  very  obvious  and  easy  ridicule.  But 
even  in  this  passage  he  did  not  commit  himself  to  the 
theory  that  all  poetry  should  be  composed  of  such  homely 
materials  ;  he  was  only  in  a  spirit  of  defiant  paradox 
playing  for  a  little  with  the  idea  that  if  a  poet  dealt 
only  with  the  feelings  of  peasants,  and  used  only  words 
known  to  them,  his  poetry  was  likely  to  be  more  perma- 


188  WORDSWORTH 

nently  intelligible  and  interesting.  The  paradox  is 
arguable,  but  against  it  must  be  set  the  fact  that  the 
words  of  rustic  dialects,  though  very  persistent,  do  be- 
come obsolete  and  acquire  new  shades  of  meaning  as 
much  as  the  words  of  literature  and  cultivated  speech  ; 
and  the  further  fact  that,  as  civilization  advances,  the 
relations  among  individuals  and  the  feelings  thence 
arising  become  too  complicated  to  be  typified  by  the 
incidents  of  life  in  a  country  parish.  This  part  of 
Wordsworth's  theory  may  be  dismissed  as  overstrained 
and  fantastic.  Only  it  must  be  remembered,  to  do  him 
justice,  that  he  did  not  propose  to  use  bare  incidents 
without  a  coloring  of  imagination,  and  that  the  poet's 
words  were  to  be  a  selection  and  a  metrical  arrangement, 
the  selection  dictated  by  the  feeling  to  be  expressed, 
and  the  feeling  by  the  poet's  sensibility. 

The  opinion  in  favor  of  rustic  language  was,  however, 
but  a  part  of  Wordsworth's  theory  of  poetic  diction,  a 
casual  and  detachable  incident.  The  main  thesis  of  his 
preface,  of  his  apology  for  his  own  poetry,  was  that 
poetry  has  no  special  language  distinct  from  that  of 
ordinary  life  or  of  prose  ;  that  the  language  of  passion, 
of  powerful  feeling,  is  the  same  whether  in  metre  or 
not  ;  that  it  is  possible  to  write  poetry  without  using 
any  other  words  than  such  as  are  to  be  found  in  prose 
writing. 

"  If  in  a  poem  there  should  he  found  a  series  of  lines,  or  even  a 
single  line,  in  which  the  language,  though  naturally  arranged, 
and  according  to  the  strict  laws  of  metre,  does  not  differ  from  that 
of  prose,  there  is  a  numerous  class  of  critics  who,  when  they 
stumhle  upon  these  prosaisms,  as  they  call  them,  imagine  that  they 
have  made  a  notahle  discovery,  and  exult  over  the  poet  as  over  a 
man  ignorant  of  his  own  profession.  Now,  these  men  would 
establish  a  canon  of  criticism  which  the  reader  will  conclude  he 
must  utterly  reject,  if  he  wishes  to  be  pleased  with  these  volumes. 
And  it  would  be  a  most  easy  task  to  prove  to  him  that  not  only 
the  language  of  a  large  portion  of  every  good  poem,  even  of  the 
most  elevated  character,  must  necessarily,  except  with  reference 


COLERIDGE    ON    WORDSWORTH  189 

to  the  metre,  in  no  respect  differ  from  that  of  good  prose,  but  like- 
wise that  some  of  the  most  interesting  parts  of  the  best  poems  will 
be  found  to  be  strictly  the  language  of  prose,  when  prose  is  well 
written." 

And  again  : 

"  It  may  be  safely  affirmed  that  there  neither  is,  nor  can  be,  any 
essential  difference  between  the  language  of  prose  and  metrical 
composition." 

This  was  the  gist  of  Wordsworth's  theory  of  poetic 
diction,  that  in  the  best  parts  of  the  best  poems  no  words 
are  used  that  are  special  and  peculiar  to  poetry,  that 
would  not  be  found  in  well-written  prose.  I  might 
claim  it,  I  think,  as  confirming  the  view  I  have  expressed 
to  you  as  to  the  influence  of  the  prose  literature  of  the 
eighteenth  century  in  effecting  the  change  that  took 
place  in  poetry  soon  after  the  French  Revolution.  But, 
3rou  ma}r  ask,  was  Wordsworth's  theory  correct  ?  Surely, 
you  will  say,  the  order  of  the  words,  the  construction  of 
the  sentences,  is  different  in  poetry  ?  And  the  selection 
of  the  words  is  different  ?  Coleridge,  in  his  criticism  of 
Wordsworth's  theory  in  the  "  Biographia  Literaria," 
perhaps  the  most  suggestive  and  eloquent  piece  of 
critical  Avriting  in  our  language,  urges  both  of  these 
considerations  as  if  Wordsworth  had  denied  them.  He 
will  not  believe  that  Wordsworth  could  have  meant  only 
that  the  words  used  in  the  best  poetry  must  be  such 
woi'ds  as  would  excite  no  surprise  if  they  appeared  in 
good  prose,  because,  he  says,  nobody  who  had  enjoyed 
the  slightest  opportunity  of  understanding  Words- 
worth's mind  and  character  would  suspect  him  of  pro- 
claiming a  truism.  Therefore  it  must  have  been  Words- 
worth's intention  to  claim  for  the  best  poetry  the  same 
style  as  prose  in  the  ordinary  sense  of  the  word  style, 
having  reference  to  the  composition,  the  arrangement, 
or,  as  Coleridge  says,  the  ordonnance  of  the  words,  and 
not     the    mere   word"    themselves.      And,  interpreting 


190  WOEDSWOETH 

Wordsworth  in  this  way,  his  friendly  critic  has  no  diffi- 
culty in  showing  that  neither  in  his  own  poetry  nor  in 
any  other  poetry  is  the  style  identical  with  that  of  prose. 
"  The  true  question  must  be,  whether  there  are  not  modes 
of  expression,  a  construction,  and  an  order  of  sentences, 
which  are  in  their  fit  and  natural  place  in  a  serious  prose 
composition,  but  would  be  disproportionate  and  hetero- 
geneous in  metrical  poetry  ;  and,  vice  versa,  whether  in 
the  language  of  a  serious  poem  there  may  not  be  an 
arrangement  both  of  words  and  of  sentences,  and  a  use 
and  a  selection  of  (what  are  called)  figures  of  speech, 
both  as  to  their  kind,  their  frequency,  and  their  occa- 
sions, which  on  a  subject  of  equal  weight  would  be 
vicious  and  alien  in  correct  and  manly  prose.  I  contend 
that  in  both  cases  the  unfitness  of  each  for  the  place  of 
the  other  frequently  will  and  ought  to  exist." 

Coleridge's  interpretation  of  Wordsworth  and  his 
reply  upon  this  interpretation  have  both  been  universally 
accepted  since  the  "  Biographia  Literaria  "  was  published, 
Coleridge's  early  intimacy  with  Wordsworth  lending 
authority  to  his  interpretation,  and  common-sense  lend- 
ing sanction  to  his  reply  to  the  theory  as  interpreted. 
And  yet  it  is  impossible  to  read  Wordsworth's  Preface 
through  with  care  enough  to  group  and  put  together 
his  detached  statements,  concentration  of  dry  thought 
not  being  one  of  his  virtues  as  a  writer,  without  feeling 
that  he  never  meant  to  deny  what  Coleridge  affirmed 
against  him  ;  that  he  abstained  from  insisting  upon  this 
difference  between  poetry  and  prose  in  point  of  arrange- 
ment only  because  he  regarded  it  as  a  truism  ;  and  that 
when  he  spoke  of  there  being  no  essential  difference 
between  the  language  of  prose  and  metrical  composition, 
he  was  thinking  of  the  mere  words,  if  by  words  we  un- 
derstand figurative  words  as  well  as  plain  literal  words. 
His  language  again  and  again  implies  that  the  dis- 
tinction between  poetry  and  prose  emphasized  by  Cole- 
ridge was  present  to  his  mind.     He  discusses  at  length 


the  poet's  theory  and  his  practice  191 

and  with  great  analytic  skill  how  and  why  it  is  that 
metre  adds  to  the  reader's  pleasure,  speaking  of  the 
"  continual  and  regular  impulses  of  pleasurable  surprise 
from  the  metrical  arrangement."  He  indicates,  in  fact, 
the  very  theory  of  the  origin  and  effect  of  metre  that 
Coleridge  develops  more  fully  and  presents  as  a  qualifica- 
tion of  Wordsworth's  doctrine.  It  was  no  part  of  that 
doctrine  that  the  poetic  order  of  words  must  necessarily 
be  the  prose  order,  though  he  contended,  in  vindication  of 
his  own  practice  in  the  metrical  ballads,  that  it  might  be 
the  prose  order,  without  losing  any  of  the  power  peculiar 
to  poetry.  The  point  that  Coleridge  labored  most  against 
Wordsworth  and  established  most  brilliantly  was  that 
there  are  figures  of  speech  which,  as  regard  kind,  and 
number,  and  occasion,  would  be  in  place  in  poetry  and  out 
of  place  in  correct  and  manly  prose.  But  I  don't  think 
that  Wordsworth  had  overlooked  even  this,  though  he 
did  not  guard  himself  with  sufficient  care  against  being 
supposed  to  have  overlooked  it  ;  for  he  says  that  "  if 
the  poet's  subject  be  judiciously  chosen,  it  -will  naturally, 
and  upon  fit  occasion,  lead  him  to  passions  the  language 
of  which,  if  selected  truly  and  judiciously,  must  neces- 
sarily be  dignified  and  variegated,  and  alive  with 
metaphors  and  figures."  What  he  objected  to  was  the 
"  poet's  intervening  any  foreign  splendor  of  his  own 
with  that  which  the  passion  naturally  suggests." 

That  it  was  the  words  and  the  words  only  that  Words- 
worth had  in  his  mind  when  he  maintained  that  the 
language  of  poetry  did  not  differ  essentially  from  the 
language  of  prose  is  further  shown  by  the  example  he 
quotes  from  Gray: 

"  In  vain  to  me  the  smiling  mornings  shine 
And  reddening  Phoebus  lifts  his  golden  fire  : 
The  birds  in  vain  their  amorous  descant  join, 
Or  cheerful  fields  resume  their  green  attire. 
These  ears,  alas  !  for  other  notes  repine  ; 
A  different  object  do  these  eyes  require  ; 


192  "WORDSWORTH 

My  lonely  anguish  melts  no  heart  but  mine; 
And  in  my  breast  the  imperfect  joys  expire : 
Yet  morning  smiles  the  busy  race  to  cheer, 
And  new-born  pleasure  brings  to  happier  men  ; 
The  fields  to  all  their  wonted  tribute  bear  ; 
To  warm  their  little  loves  the  birds  complain. 
I  fruitless  mourn  to  him  that  cannot  hear, 
And  iceep  the  more  because  I  weep  in  vain." 

"  It  will  easily  be  perceived,"  he  goes  on  to  say,  "  that 
the  only  part  of  this  sonnet  which  is  of  any  value  is  the 
lines  printed  in  italics  ;  it  is  equally  obvious  that,  except 
in  the  rhyme,  and  in  the  use  of  the  single  word  '  fruit- 
less'  for  fruitlessly,  which  is  so  far  a  defect,  the  lan- 
guage of  these  lines  does  in  no  respect  differ  from  that 
of  prose." 

If  Wordsworth's  plain  statements  had  not  been  suf- 
ficiently explicit,  his  comments  on  this  passage  would 
have  been  sufficient  to  show  that  what  be  really  objected 
to  was  the  habitual  employment  by  poets  of  certain 
conventional  figures  of  speech  that  had  dropped  out  of 
the  prose  style,  and  had  come  to  be  regarded  as  the  ex- 
clusive colors  of  poetic  diction.     The  expulsion  of  these 
conventionalities  was  all  the  revolution    that  he  pro- 
posed in  poetic  style.     The  truth  is  that  in  the  heat  of 
the  moment,  with  all  the  arrogance  and  obstinacy  of  his 
nature,  roused  by  the  ridicule  poured  on  his  ballads,  he 
exaggerated  the  difference  between  his  own  poetry  and 
that  of  his  predecessors.     He  told  the  public  with  lofty 
anger  that  the  public  taste  was  corrupt,  and  that  if  they 
wished  to  enjoy  his  poems,   which   were    deliberately 
adapted  to  interest   mankind    permanently,  they  must 
give  up   much   of   what    was  ordinarily  enjoyed.     All 
this  was  provoked  by  the  open  contempt  for  his  pro- 
saisms.    He  carried  the  war  into  the  enemy's  country 
with  the  angry  retort  :    "  Cleanse  yourselves  of  your 
gaudy,  glossy,  meaningless,  conventional  x>oeticisms,  and 
then  you  will  be  able  to  enjoy  my  prosaisms"    His 


THE    TOET'S    THEORY    AND    HIS    PRACTICE  193 

special  plea  for  the  colloquial  language  of  rustics  was 
but  a  side  issue  in  his  general  poetic  theory,  intended 
only  for  the  special  defence  of  a  few  passages  in  the 
"  Lyrical  Ballads"— in  "  The  Thorn,"  for  example,  and 
in  "  The  Idiot  Boy."  A  not  uncommon  impression  is 
that  Wordsworth  advocated  this  as  the  only  fitting 
language  for  poetry,  and,  upon  this  misunderstanding, 
readers  naturally  charge  the  poet  with  gross  inconsist- 
ency between  his  theory  and  his  practice  ;  for  if  you 
open  a  volume  of  Wordsworth's  poems  anywhere,  you 
will  find  abundance  of  words  that  are  never  to  be  heard 
in  the  mouth  of  an  ordinary  rustic.  But  you  will  not,  I 
think,  find  many  words  that  would  be  considered  inad- 
missible in  prose  style,  supposing  always,  what  was 
part  of  his  theory,  that  the  prose  writer  was  in  the  same 
exalted  key  of  feeling  with  the  poet.  You  may  say,  as 
Coleridge  said,  that  this  is  in  fact  an  unreal  and  artificial 
supposition  ;  that  when  feelings  reach  a  certain  pitch  of 
intensity,  they  cannot  as  a  matter  of  fact  be  expressed 
in  prose  so  as  to  command  the  sympathy  of  the  reader  ; 
that  metrical  language  is  the  customary  vehicle  of 
intense  feeling  ;  that  we  expect  to  find  a  less  impas- 
sioned strain  in  prose,  and  are  consequently  disposed  to 
ridicule,  as  out  of  place,  figures  of  speech  in  harmony 
with  the  strain,  which  from  habit  and  association  we 
regard  as  appropriate  in  poetry.  That  Wordsworth 
would  have  admitted  this,  if  it  had  been  put  to  him,  we 
have  every  reason  to  believe  from  what  he  actually  says, 
.but  when  he  wrote  the  Preface,  he  was  in  too  aggressive 
a  mood  to  be  particular  about  stating  his  doctrine  with 
all  the  explicit  qualifications  needful  to  meet  obvious 
objections.  He  did  not  care  to  present  it  in  such  a  way 
as  to  win  instant  acceptance  from  common-sense.  He 
was  for  the  moment  wilfully,  not  to  say  arroganthr, 
paradoxical  ;  and  while  we  recognize  that  he  was  mis- 
understood, we  must  admit  that  he  had  himself  to 
blame. 


194  WORDSWORTH 

Another  part  of  the  poetic  theory  set  forth  in  the 
Preface  has  received  much  less  attention  than  his  theory 
of  poetic  diction,  although  it  deserves  more  as  a  clue 
to  Wordsworth's  main  point  of  distinction  from  other 
poets.  It  concerns  his  choice  of  subjects  and  his  mode 
of  constructing  his  poems.  Perhaps  evolving  or  devel- 
oping is  a  better  word  to  use  than  constructing,  because 
on  principle  the  poet  left  his  imagination  more  free 
than  the  artist  generally  does  to  follow  the  impulses  of 
the  feelings  aroused  by  his  subject.  Wordsworth's 
theory  was  put  forward  primarily  to  defend  himself 
against  the  charge  of  triviality  and  insignificance  in  his 
choice  of  subjects  and  incidents,  the  charge  that  Mrs. 
Oliphant  repeats.  But  it  has  a  much  wider  bearing,  and 
it  is  worth  taking  some  pains  to  understand  his  meaning 
for  two  reasons  :  In  the  first  place,  such  poetry  as 
Wordsworth's,  as  he  himself  pointed  out,  cannot  be 
thoroughly  enjoyed  unless  you  follow  the  course  of  his 
imagination  in  composing  it.  Mere  passive  reading 
will  not  do;  the  reader's  imagination  must  exert  itself 
to  accompany  the  poet's.  And  in  the  second  place, 
though  this  is  an  inferior  motive,  there  are  several  cant 
terms  in  contemporary  criticism  that  have  grown  out 
of  Wordsworth's  doctrine,  and  are  often  used — some- 
times intelligently  and  sometimes  not,  but,  in  one  way 
or  the  other,  often.  The  fashionable  word  evolution, 
when  rightly  employed  in  poetic  criticism,  is  employed 
in  a  sense  defined  by  Wordsworth's  theory  as  to  how  a 
poet  should  proceed. 

Accused  of  choosing  trivial  incidents  in  his  lyrical 
ballads,  Wordsworth's  repty  was  that  "  the  feeling 
therein  developed  gives  importance  to  the  action  and 
situation,  and  not  the  action  and  situation  to  the  feeling." 
"  Poetry  is  the  spontaneous  overflow  of  powerful  feel- 
ing." The  poet's  business  is  to  study  "  the  manner  in 
which  we  associate  ideas  in  a  state  of  excitement,"  and 
in  proportion  as  the  succession  of  ideas  in  his  poetry 


THE    rOET's    DEFENCE    OF    IIIS    DOCTRINE  195 

obeys  these  natural  laws  of  association,  follows  this 
course  of  evolution,  his  poetry  is  real  poetry,  and  not  a 
rhetorical  imitation.  Closely  intervoven  with  this  doc- 
trine in  Wordsworth's  statement  of  it  was  another  not 
strictly  relevant,  that  people  are  too  much  accustomed 
to  the  use  of  gross  and  violent  stimulants  in  poetry  ; 
that  they  thirst  for  startling  incidents,  strange  situa- 
tions, violent  passions,  the  favorite  objects  of  sensational 
and  romantic  fiction.  This  charge  against  the  public 
taste  was  part  of  Wordsworth's  indignant  and  defiant 
retort  upon  his  critics,  and  not,  as  I  have  said,  strictly 
relevant  to  his  theory  as  to  the  right  mode  of  poetic 
evolution  out  of  powerful  feeling.  Strictly  speaking, 
of  course,  the  mode  of  evolution  is  independent  of  the 
origin  of  the  intense  feeling  that  sets  the  imagination  to 
work  ;  we  can  only  say  that  the  feeling  must  be  there, 
no  matter  what  the  nature  of  the  stimulant  that  has 
given  occasion  to  it.  Still,  this  complaint  about  "  the 
degrading  thirst  for  outrageous  stimulation,"  as  he  calls 
it,  has  a  certain  connection  with  Wordsworth's  doctrine 
about  the  poet's  main  business.  For,  the  poet  being 
bound  to  study  "  the  manner  in  which  we  associate  ideas 
in  a  state  of  excitement,"  he  can  do  this  only  in  his 
own  mind  ;  he  must  study  how  his  imagination  is 
affected  by  events  within  his  own  experience.  Hence, 
while  other  poets,  as  he  pictured  them,  were  ransacking 
history  for  good  poetical  subjects,  such  as  were  in  their 
own  nature  extraordinary,  and  might  be  tricked  out  by 
the  fancy  in  such  a  way  as  to  impress  all  readers,  he 
chose  his  subjects  from  incidents  in  familiar  life  that 
had  strongly  impressed  him  and  put  his  imagination  in 
motion.  But  there  was  another  condition  of  good 
poetry.  Not  every  image  that  the  excited  mind  con- 
jures up  is  necessarily  poetical.  The  poet  must  select 
and  modify  for  a  particular  purpose,  that  of  giving 
immediate  pleasure.  "  Nor  let  this  necessity  of  pro- 
ducing immediate  pleasure," he  cries,  "be  considered  as 


196  WORDSWORTH 

a  degradation  of  the  poet's  art.  It  is  far  otherwise.  It 
is  an  acknowledgment  of  the  beauty  of  the  universe — 
an  acknowledgment  the  more  sincere  because  not 
formal,  but  indirect;  it  is  a  task  light  and  easy  to 
him  who  looks  at  the  world  in  the  spirit  of  love; 
further,  it  is  a  homage  paid  to  the  native  and  naked 
dignity  of  man,  to  the  grand  elementary  principle 
of  pleasure,  by  which  he  knows  and  feels  and  lives 
and  moves." 

The  poet's  choice  of  what  his  imagination  evolves 
being  thus  restricted,  how  should  he  proceed  in  choos- 
ing his  subjects?     When  any  incident  excites  him  to 
intense  feeling,  he   should  study  how  his   imagination 
works  in  raising  that  feeling  to  a  higher  pitch  if  it  is 
pleasurable;  or  if  it  is  painful,  throwing  a  veil  over  it 
or  changing  the  light  that  falls  upon  it  till  it  can  be 
looked  at  with   pathetic  resignation.     In  every  person 
the  imagination  is  more  or  less  active  in  this  work  of 
increase  and  consolation;    conjuring  only  images  that 
reconcile  us  to  sorrow  and  give  a  lovelier  complexion  to 
joy.     The  poet,  with  his  keener  sensibilities  and  more 
active  imagination,  does  this    more    than    other    men. 
Wordsworth  tried  deliberately  to  be  true  to  nature  as  a 
poet  by  putting  into  metrical  language  only  the  imagery 
that  grew  up  in  his  mind  under  the   impulse  of  intense 
feeling.     If  you  read  "  The  Thorn,"  you  can  trace  how 
the  imaginative  structure  was  gradually  reared  that  had 
its  origin  in  a  feeling  of  keen  pity  for  the  poor,  outcast, 
suspected  lunatic  Martha  Ray.     The  thought   of  this 
outcast,  when   he  heard  her  story   or  saw  her   sitting 
by  her   thorn,  haunted  him.     The  poem  really  repre- 
sents the  fancies  with  which   he   soothed   the  disquiet 
of  his  own    spirit   at   the    existence   of  such    miseries 
in  the   world,  just  as  the  poem   of  "  The  Idiot  Boy  ': 
is  composed  of  the  fancies  with  which  he  heightened 
his  enjoyment  of  the  touching   incident   that  was  its 
foundation  in  fact. 


DANGEK    OF    TAKING    ADVICE    OF    CRITICS  197 

It  must  be  further  added,  and  the  fact  explains  the 
strength  as  well  as  the  imperfections  of  Wordsworth's 
poetry,  that,  writing  on  these  principles,  he  wrote  chiefly 
to  please  himself,  "  with  his  eye  on  the  object,"  as  he 
said,  and  without  much  regard  to  the  effect  to  be  pro- 
duced upou  the  reader.  When  the  feelings  stirred  in 
him  by  what  he  saw,  or  heard,  or  read  were  satisfied 
by  the  work  of  his  imagination,  he  had  little  solicitude 
about  the  best  means  of  communicating  the  same  satis- 
faction to  his  reader.  The  best  means  were  the  means 
that  gave  satisfaction  to  himself.  And  as  his  own  life 
was  peculiar, — the  life  of  a  solitary  student,  or  of  a 
student  moving  within  a  narrow  circle  of  interests, — it 
was  not  to  be  expected  that  what  interested  him  would 
interest  every-body.  Of  this  he  was  aware,  but  it  did 
not  influence  his  practice. 

"lam  sensible,"  he  wrote,  "that  my  associations  must  have 
sometimes  been  particular  instead  of  general,  and  that,  conse- 
quently, giving  to  things  a  false  importance,  I  may  sometimes 
have  written  upon  unworthy  subjects  ;  but  I  am  less  apprehensive 
on  this  account,  than  that  my  language  may  frequently  have  suf- 
fered from  those  arbitrary  connections  of  feelings  and  ideas  with 
particular  words  and  phrases,  from  which  no  man  can  altogether 
protect  himself.  Hence  I  have  no  doubt  that,  in  some  instances, 
feelings,  even  of  the  ludicrous,  may  be  given  to  my  readers  by 
expressions  which  appeared  to  me  tender  and  pathetic.  Such 
faulty  expressions,  were  I  convinced  they  were  faulty  at  present, 
and  that  they  must  necessarily  continue  to  be  so,  I  would  will- 
ingly take  all  reasonable  pains  to  correct.  But  it  is  dangerous  to 
make  these  alterations  on  the  simple  authority  of  a  few  individ- 
uals, or  even  of  certain  classes  of  men  ;  for  where  the  under- 
standing of  an  author  is  not  convinced,  or  his  feelings  altered, 
this  cannot  be  done  without  great  injury  to  himself :  for  his  own 
feelings  are  his  stay  and  support,  and  if  he  set  them  aside  in  one 
instance,  he  may  be  induced  to  repeat  this  act  till  his  mind  shall 
lose  all  confidence  in  itself,  and  become  utterly  debilitated." 

We  need  go  no  further  to  understand  the  antagonism 
that  Wordsworth  provoked.     It  was  no  personal  malig- 


198  WORDSWORTH 

nity.  Controversy  took  a  personal  turn  because  he  chal- 
lenged comparison  between  his  own  feelings  and  those 
of  others.  It  is  the  merit  of  such  poetry  that  it  is  the 
expression  of  genuine  feeling  actually  felt,  and  not  of 
what  the  poet  supposed  that  the  world  in  general  would 
feel  in  presence  of  certain  objects. 


CHAPTER  XIV 

WORDS WOKTH    (contlil  lied) — COLERIDGE — SOUTHEY 

You  will  be  pleased  to  hear,  I  think,  that  I  have 
abandoned  the  idea  of  trying  to  lecture  you  into  an  ad- 
miration of  Wordsworth.  I  had  intended  to  occupy 
this  lecture  with  going  over  some  of  Wordsworth's 
poems,  and  pointing  out  their  distinctive  charms  ;  but 
on  mature  consideration  I  have  come  to  the  conclusion 
that  I  should  only  be  wasting  your  time,  because  those 
of  you  who  are  fitted  by  temperament  to  enjoy  his 
poems  will  do  so  without  any  prompting,  and  those  of 
you  who  are  not  would  probably  remain  deaf  to  any 
rhetoric  of  mine  in  their  favor.  No  poet  is  more  un- 
equal than  Wordsworth,  and  I  cannot  forget  the  fact 
that  when  I  was  young  myself  I  had  too  intolerant  an 
aversion  to  his  prosy  sermonizing  to  have  patience 
enough  to  approach  in  a  sympathetic  spirit  what  I  now 
read  with  delight.  It  was  this,  indeed,  that  at  first 
tempted  me  to  think  of  picking  out  a  few  poems  that 
might  serve  as  an  introduction  to  a  sympathetic  under- 
standing of  the  man,  but,  on  the  whole,  I  think  I  had 
better  leave  that  to  the  influence  of  time.  It  is  charac- 
teristic of  Wordsworth  that  his  imagination  was  always 
set  in  motion  by  personal  feelings  ;  and  unless  you  sym- 
pathize with  the  initiatory  feeling,  which  you  are  not 
likely  to  do  if  you  have  not  passed  through  something 
of  the  same  experience,  you  cannot  be  expected  to  fol- 
low his  imagination  in  its  flight  without  an  effort  that 
is  fatal  to  any  real  enjoyment  of  poetry.  You  can  al- 
ways be  sure  of  finding  in  Wordsworth  a  genuine  feel- 
ing of  some  kind,  and  if  you  have  any  delight  in  exter- 
nal nature,  you  will  find  that  he  awakens  you,  as  no 

199 


200  WORDSWORTH 

other  poet  can,  to  unsuspected  aspects  of  familiar  tilings, 
not  merely  fixing  the  eye  on  striking  features  that  had 
escaped  your  observation,  but  inspiring  them  with  new 
suggestions.  But  preliminary  sympathy  with  the  poet's 
attitude  is  indispensable,  and  something  more  than  a 
casual  lecture  is  needed  to  give  you  that. 

I  shall  content  myself,  therefore,  in  continuation  and 
conclusion  of  what  I  said  the  other  day,  with  referring 
to  a  few  poems  that  may  illustrate  the  relation  between 
the  imaginative  structure  and  the  emotional  motive  in 
his  poetry.  You  remember  my  quoting  his  saying  that 
true  poetry  has  its  origin  in  emotion  ;  it  is  emotion  that 
sets  the  imagination,  the  creative  constructive  faculty, 
at  work  ;  the  imagination  exerts  itself  to  multiply  and 
modify  this  initial  feeling.  You  may  call  this,  then, 
the  emotional  motive,  while  the  fabric  reared  at  the 
bidding  of  this  motive,  and  conditioned  through  all  its 
parts  by  the  nature  of  this  motive,  may  be  called  the 
imaginative  structure,  the  temple  reared  as  a  fitting 
habitation  for  the  feeling  that  commanded  the  poet's 
creative  faculty  to  build  a  home  for  it.  Now,  Words- 
worth, as  you  will  remember,  held  that  poets  generally 
worked  under  the  influence  of  too  outrageous  emotional 
stimulants  ;  their  imaginations  were  not  quick  enough, 
not  spontaneous  enough,  not  sufficiently  delighted  with 
their  own  exercise,  to  be  put  in  motion  by  slight  and 
ordinary  impulses;  they  remained  still,  dull,  inert,  except 
when  visited  by  strong,  violent,  extraordinary  excite- 
ments. His  imagination  was  more  excitable,  more  ready 
to  stir  ;  and  besides,  on  moral  grounds,  he  deliberately 
trained  it  to  respond  to  slight  impulses,  and  find  its 
delisrht  in  its  own  exercise. 

Hence  arises  what  at  first  sight  seems  an  anomaly  in 
Wordsworth's  poetry,  as  well  as  an  apparent  contradic- 
tion between  his  practice  and  some  parts  of  his  theory. 
Search  his  poems  through,  and  you  will  find  some  that 
start  from  humbler,  slighter  themes  than  those  of  any 


THE    EMOTIONAL    MOTIVE    IN    POETRY  201 

other  poet  of  high  rank.  But  his  poetry  is  not  on  that 
account  simple.  On  the  contrary,  search  his  poems 
through,  and  you  will  find  some,  such  as  the  famous 
odes  to  "  Duty "  and  on  the  "  Intimations  of  Immor- 
tality," that  are  as  intricate,  elaborate,  and  abstruse,  as 
remote  from  the  ordinary  paths  of  thought,  as  ever 
poet's  imagination  created.  The  emotional  motive  is 
simple,  the  passion  has  almost  always  a  simple  origin, 
and  often  is  of  no  great  intensity;  but  the  imaginative 
structure  is  generally  elaborate,  and,  when  the  poet  is  at 
his  best,  supremely  splendid  and  gorgeous.  No  poet 
has  built  such  magnificent  palaces  of  rare  material  for 
the  ordinary  every-day  homely  human  affections.  And 
it  is  because  he  has  invested  our  every-day  principles  of 
conduct,  which  are  so  apt  to  become  threadbare,  with 
such  imperishable  robes  of  finest  texture  and  richest 
design  that  Wordsworth  holds  so  high  a  place  among 
the  great  moralists  of  his  race. 

Take  the  greatest  of  his  poems,  the  "  Ode  to  Duty." 
The  emotional  motive  to  this  is  nothing  more  extraor- 
dinary than  a  quiet  resolution,  formed  in  no  tempestuous 
moment  of  repentance,  but  in  a  placid  stretch  of  even 
life,  to  make  duty  the  rule  of  his  conduct.  But  with 
what  a  splendor  his  imagination  invests  this  !  to  what 
heights  of  ecstas}'  does  he  lift  this  simple  feeling  ! — 

"  Through  no  disturbance  of  my  soul, 
Or  strong  compunction  in  me  wrought, 
I  supplicate  for  thy  control  ; 
But  in  the  quietness  of  thought : 
Me  this  unchartered  freedom  tires  ; 
I  feel  the  weight  of  chance-desires  ; 
My  hopes  no  more  must  change  their  name, 
I  long  for  a  repose  that  ever  is  the  same. 

"  Stern  Lawgiver  !  yet  thou  dost  wear 
The  Godhead's  most  benignant  grace  ; 
Nor  know  we  anything  so  fair 
As  is  the  smile  upon  thy  face  : 


202  WORDSWORTH 

Flowers  laugh  before  thee  on  their  beds 
And  fragrance  in  thy  footing  treads  ; 
Thou  dost  preserve  the  stars  from  wrong  ; 
And  the  most  ancient  heavens,  through  Thee,  are  fresh  and 
strong. 

"  To  humbler  functions,  awful  Power  ! 
I  call  thee  :  I  myself  commend 
Unto  thy  guidance  from  this  hour  ; 
Oh,  let  my  weakness  have  an  end  ! 
Give  unto  me,  made  lowly  wise, 
The  spirit  of  self-sacrifice  ; 
The  confidence  of  reason  give  ; 
And  in  the  light  of  truth  thy  Bqndman  let  me  live  ! " 

So  simple  is  the  motive  often  that  unless  the  path 
taken  by  the  imagination  is  of  itself  delightful  to  you, 
unless  you  are  caught  up  with  it  and  transported,  you 
are  left  at  the  end  with  a  feeling  as  if  there  had  been 
much  ado  about  nothing.  In  illustration  of  this  I  would 
cite  "  The  Solitary  Reaper  "  : 

"  Behold  her,  single  in  the  field, 
Yon  solitary  Highland  lass  ! 
Reaping  and  singing  by  herself  ; 
Stop  here,  or  gently  pass  ! 
Alone  she  cuts  and  binds  the  grain, 
And  sings  a  melancholy  strain  ; 
O  listen  !  for  the  Vale  profound 
Is  overflowing  with  the  sound. 


'& 


"  No  nightingale  did  ever  chaunt 
More  welcome  notes  to  weary  bands 
Of  travellers  in  some  shady  haunt, 
Among  Arabian  sands : 
A  voice  so  thrilling  ne'er  was  heard 
In  spring-time  from  the  Cuckoo-bird, 
Breaking  the  silence  of  the  seas 
Among  the  farthest  Hebrides. 

"  Will  no  one  tell  me  what  she  sings  ? 
Perhaps  the  plaintive  numbers  flow 
For  old,  unhappy,  far-off  things, 
And  battles  long  ago  : 


"  THE    SOLITARY    REAPER  "  203 

Or  is  it  some  more  humble  lay, 
Familiar  matter  of  to-day  ? 
Some  natural  sorrow,  loss,  or  pain, 
That  has  been,  and  may  be  again  ! 

What'er  the  theme,  the  Maiden  sane: 
As  if  her  song  could  have  no  ending ; 
I  saw  her  singing  at  her  work, 
And  o'er  the  sickle  bending  ; — 
I  listened,  motionless  and  still  ; 
And,  as  I  mounted  up  the  hill, 
The  music  in  my  heart  I  bore, 
Long  after  it  was  heard  no  more." 


Many  of  Wordsworth's  imaginative  flights,  and  these 
the  most  prized  by  his  admirers,  take  their  start  from 
his  delight  in  discovei-ing  some  new  aspect  of  Nature, 
or  in  the  sudden  flash  upon  his  mind  of  some  reflection 
that  had  never  before  inspired  a  poet.  Wordsworth  is 
sometimes  called  a  nature-worshipper,  but  it  would  be 
more  correct  to  call  him  a  worshipper  of  the  novelties 
of  thought  that  occurred  to  him  in  the  minute  observa- 
tion of  nature.  The  mere  delight  of  the  eye,  the  glory 
of  vision,  had  great  charms  for  him,  but  greater  still 
was  the  charm  of  the  imaginative  exercise  to  which  new 
revelations  inspired  him.  You  remember  the  passage 
in  which  he  describes  what  first  moved  him,  as  early  as 
in  his  fourteenth  year,  to  resolve  to  be  a  poet,  the  sud- 
den conviction  flashing  upon  him  that  there  were  many 
things  in  nature  that  poets  had  never  observed  ?  From 
that  moment  he  kept  in  view,  with  the  persistent  obsti- 
nacy of  will  that  was  so  marked  a  feature  in  his  charac- 
ter, a  definite  purpose  to  supply  the  deficiency.  And  he 
carried  out  the  purpose  not  merely  by  what  might  be 
irreverently  called  simile-hunting  in  nature,  which  many 
of  his  admirers  in  prose  and  verse  have  done  to  death, 
never  allowing  a  leaf  to  cross  their  path,  or  a  bird  to 

sing  within  their  hearing,  without   putting  it  on   the 
17 


204  WORDSWORTH 

rack  to  extract  a  moral  from  it,  or  treasuring  it  up  in 
their  memories,  to  be  dragged  in  as  after-occasion  might 
offer  as  a  rhetorical  embellishment.  Wordsworth  did, 
indeed,  labor  after  new  images  from  nature,  and  some- 
times, though  not  often,  used  them  as  a  rhetorician 
rather  than  a  poet — that  is  to  say,  to  tickle  the  fancy 
rather  than  touch  the  heart.  But  often  when  a  new 
aspect  of  nature  touched  him,  he  allowed  his  imagina- 
tion to  dwell  upon  it,  and  circle  round  it,  and  weave  for 
it  a  metrical  body  in  which  it  might  live  among  the 
permanent  companions  of  the  human  spirit.  Once,  for 
example,  as  he  stood  in  the  twilight  among  his  favorite 
hills,  when  the  gathering  gloom  had  covered  over  all 
traces  of  the  handiwork  of  man,  and  even  the  transient 
features  of  the  vegetation  were  dim  and  indistinct, 
nothing  then  being  visible  but  the  vague  outlines  of  the 
valley,  the  soft  gleam  of  the  lake,  and  the  shadowy 
masses  of  the  mountains,  the  thought  came  to  him  that 
this  was  the  spectacle  that  had  met  the  eyes  of  men  in 
all  ages,  had  remained  constant  to  human  vision  through 
all  the  changes  that  had  passed  over  the  face  of  nature. 
It  was  a  solemn  and  affecting  thought,  and  the  poet's 
imagination  has  provided  for  it  a  permanent  dwelling- 
place  in  his  sonnet  to  Twilight  : 

"  Hail,  Twilight,  sovereign  of  one  peaceful  hour  ! 
Not  dull  art  thou  as  undiscerning  Night  ; 
But  studious  only  to  remove  from  sight 
Day's  mutable  distinctions. — Ancient  Power  ! 
Thus  did  the  waters  gleam,  the  mountains  lower, 
To  the  rude  Briton,  when  in  wolf-skin  vest 
Here  roving  wild,  he  laid  him  down  to  rest 
On  the  bare  rock,  or  through  a  leafy  bower 
Looked  ere  his  eyes  were  closed.     By  him  was  seen 
The  self-same  Vision  which  we  now  behold, 
At  thy  meek  bidding,  Shadowy  Power  !  brought  forth  ; 
These  mighty  barriers,  and  the  gulf  between  ; 
The  flood,  the  stars, — a  spectacle  as  old 
As  the  besinnincr  of  the  heavens  and  earth." 


SONNET    ON    STEAMBOATS  205 

And  it  was  not  only  in  the  solitude  of  hill  and  valley 
that  such  thoughts  came  to  him.  One  of  the  best 
known  of  his  sonnets  is  that  composed  on  Westminster 
Bridge.  If  Wordsworth  was  not  the  first  poet  to 
attempt  to  express  the  fact  that  a  more  profound  feeling 
of  stillness  and  calm  is  experienced  in  cities  before  the 
rush  and  roar  of  the  day  has  begun  than  in  the  loneliest 
of  mountain  solitudes,  he  has  given  such  perfect  expres- 
sion to  the  truth  that  he  is  entitled  to  all  the  honor  of 
the  discovery. 

It  is  a  distinctive  feature  in  Wordsworth's  nature- 
worship,  one  that  marks  him  off  from  lovers  of  less 
robust  and  healthy  sentiment,  that  his  conception  of 
nature  was  wide  enough  to  include  the  works  of  man. 
He  held  in  theory  that  nothing  was  inharmonious  in 
nature  when  seen  through  the  right  imaginative 
medium  ;  and  though,  when  the  railway  threatened  his 
own  Westmoreland  retreats,  he  hurled  metrical  thunder- 
bolts at  the  invader,  this  was  in  his  later  years,  and 
before  that  time  his  imagination  had  been  able  to 
reconcile  the  eye  to  what  men  of  more  confined  range 
of  mental  vision  can  only  regard  as  discordant  and 
unsightty.  When  we  read  his  sonnet  on  Steamboats, 
Viaducts,  and  Railways,  composed  during  the  tour  of 
1833,  we  feel  convinced  that,  if  he  had  not  been  dis- 
turbed from  his  natural  balance  by  the  projected 
Kendal  and  Windermere  Railway,  he  might  have 
found  the  risjht  imaginative  medium  through  which 
to  hear  the  whistle,  and  would  not  have  called  upon 
the  startled  mountains,  vales,  and  floods  to  share 
with  him  the  passion  of  a  just  disdain.  As  this 
sonnet  is  not  generally  known,  you  will  pardon  me 
for  quoting  it : 

"  Motions  and  Means,  on  land  and  sea  at  war 
With  old  poetic  feeling,  not  for  this, 
Shall  ye  by  Poets  even,  be  judged  amiss  ! 
Nor  shall  your  presence,  howsoe'er  it  mar 


206  WORDSWORTH 

The  loveliness  of  Nature,  prove  a  bar 

To  the  Mind's  gaining  that  prophetic  sense 

Of  future  change,  that  point  of  vision,  whence 

May  be  discovered  what  in  soul  ye  are. 

In  spite  of  all  that  beauty  may  disown 

In  your  harsh  features,  Nature  doth  embrace 

Her  lawful  offspring  in  Man's  art  ;  and  Time, 

Pleased  with  your  triumphs  o'er  his  brother  Space, 

Accepts  from  your  bold  hands  the  proffered  crown 

Of  hope,  and  smiles  on  you  with  cheer  sublime." 


Before  passing  from  Wordsworth  I  would  recom- 
mend those  who  wish  to  give  him  a  trial  as  a  companion 
not  to  attempt  "  The  Prelude  "  or  "  The  Excursion  "  at 
first,  but  to  search  about  among  the  shorter  poems  for 
some  congenial  spot  in  which  sympathy  and  admiration 
may  take  root  and  develop  into  intimate  enjoyment. 
Matthew  Arnold  made  a  selection  from  the  poems,  and 
wrote  a  preface  to  them.  He  is  the  writer  to  put  you 
in  sympathy  with  Wordsworth,  if  any  human  being  can. 
It  is  a  fashion  to  deride  the  "  This  will  never  do,"  witli 
which  Jeffrey  opened  his  review  of  "  The  Excursion." 
But  has  it  ever  done?  I  have  never  heard  of  or 
seen  any  body  prepared  to  say  that  "  The  Excursion  " 
can  be  read  with  unflagging  delight.  It  contains  many 
splendid  passages,  but  the  bulk  of  it  many  of  Words- 
worth's most  ardent  admirers  pass  by  with  indifference, 
if  not  with  actual  repugnance.  To  take  the  case  of 
Dean  Church,  for  example  :  there  is  a  manifest  incon- 
sistency between  what  he  says  of  Jeffrey  and  his  own 
comments  on  "  The  Excursion."  At  one  place  he  tells 
us  that  the  sneers  of  the  Edinburgh  Review  were  in 
vain,  and  showed  only  that  the  poem  was  in  advance  of 
the  times  ;  while  again,  referring  to  the  poem  itself,  he 
admits  that,  though  many  passages  are  majestic,  we  can- 
not speak  so  highly  of  their  contents,  and  that  the  poet 
is  at  times  both  pompous  and  obscure.  Jeffrey  said 
nothing  stronger  against  "The  Excursion"  than  this, 


THE    LAKE    TOETS  20V 

and  the  truth   is   that  most  of   his  criticism  has  been 
amply  confirmed  and  justified. 

And  now  for  a  short  introduction  to  Coleridge  and  a 
shorter  to  Southey.  It  was  owing  to  an  extraneous 
accident,  and  not  on  the  ground  of  any  resemblance  in 
their  character  or  in  their  poetic  principles,  that  they 
were  spoken  of  in  their  lifetime  as  forming  a  school 
nicknamed  the  Lake  Poets.  Three  men  more  dissimilar 
could  not  have  been  found — Wordsworth,  absorbed  in  a 
definitely  conceived  poetic  mission,  living  solely  for  it, 
day  after  day  and  year  after  year  alternately  opening 
his  mind  with  wise  passiveness  till  an  inspiration  should 
seize  it,  and  working  with  strenuous  vigor  when  the 
inspiration  came  ;  Coleridge,  dreamy,  speculative,  aim- 
less, rich  in  poetic  and  philosophic  projects,  but  poor  in 
perseverance,  an  inspired  creator  of  splendid  fragments, 
paving  with  good  resolutions  the  way  to  slender  achieve- 
ment ;  Southey,  a  man  of  immense  intellectual  energy 
and  copious  literary  faculty,  but  no  distinctive  genius, 
a  ready  and  indefatigable  writer,  full  of  ambition  and 
self-confidence,  writing  epics  for  fame,  reviewing  articles 
and  books  for  a  livelihood,  a  professional  man  of  letters 
who  cheerfully  resigned  his  youthful  ambitions  to  fol- 
low a  life  of  regular  methodical  production  of  such 
works  as  editors  and  booksellers  would  contract  to 
receive  and  pay  for  on  delivery,  putting  fame  on  one 
side  except  in  so  far  as  it  was  compatible  with  honest 
labor  for  the  support  of  his  household.  The  lives  of  the 
three  ran  in  channels  that  diverged  more  and  more  as 
the  streams  lengthened.  They  were  too  different  in 
character  ever  to  have  formed  a  school.  Their  poetic 
ideals  were  different.  We  may  doubt  whether  Southey 
could  have  ever  understood  Wordsworth's  conception  of 
poetry  as  the  imaginative  embodiment  of  personal  emo- 
tion ;  at  any  rate,  he  went  a  very  different  way  to  work, 
ranging  through  history  for  subjects   likely  in    them- 


208  COLEKIDGE 

selves  to  impress  his  readers.  It  may  have  been  that  as 
a  practical  man,  under  the  imperious  necessity  of  pro- 
ducing what  would  sell,  he  felt  that  he  could  not  afford 
to  wait  and  watch  for  moments  of  inspiration,  but 
must  go  in  search  of  subjects  capable  of  impressive 
treatment.  This  at  least  was  what  he  did,  and  his 
poetry  has  not  one  quality  in  common  with  Words- 
worth's. Rebellion  against  the  tyranny  of  the  couplet, 
it  might  be  said,  for  Southey  threw  himself  with  pre- 
sumptuous energy  into  metrical  experiments,  and  his 
epics  abound  in  irregular  freaks  of  rhythm.  But  such 
vagaries  were  no  part  of  Wordsworth's  system,  although 
at  the  time  there  is  no  doubt  that,  forming  as  they  did  the 
most  superficially  striking  feature  of  Southey's  "  Thai- 
aba,"  they  confirmed  the  impression  that  he  Avas  leagued 
with  Wordsworth  and  Coleridge  in  a  conspiracy  to  propa- 
gate the  heresies  of  the  Preface  to  the  "  Lyrical  Ballads." 
It  was,  in  fact,  in  a  review  of  "Thalaba"  in  the  first 
number  of  the  Edinburgh  Review,  in  1802,  that  the 
existence  of  the  Lake  School  was  first  proclaimed  to  the 
world.  The  reviewer  had  probably  heard  that  all  three 
poets  were  domiciled  in  the  Lake  Country,  and,  looking 
to  the  obtrusive  irregularities  of  "Thalaba"  and  the 
startling  paradoxes  of  Wordsworth's  poetic  gospel,  it 
was  natural,  perhaps,  that  he  should  jump  to  the  con- 
clusion that  this  band  of  brothers  had  retired  from  the 
world  to  work  out  in  secluded  companionship  the  doc- 
trines-of  the  Preface.  It  was  a  circumstance  in  favor 
of  a  conclusion  recommended  by  its  dramatic  effective- 
ness that,  some  years  before,  Southey  and  Coleridge 
had  published  a  volume  in  conjunction,  while  Words- 
worth and  Coleridge  were  the  joint  authors  of  the 
"Lyrical  Ballads."  The  truth  was  that  Southey  was 
not  at  the  time  a  resident  in  the  Lake  Country,  though 
Coleridge  was  established  there  for  the  sake  of  Words- 
worth's companionship,  and  Coleridge  and  Southey  had 
married    sisters,   and    Mrs,    Southey    had    spent    some 


Coleridge's  influence  on  worosworth       209 

months  with  Mrs.  Coleridge  while  Southey,  not  yet 
settled  down  to  his  life-work  as  a  man  of  letters,  was 
wandering  about  in  vague  prospect  of  diplomatic 
employment.  It  was  not  till  1803  that  Southey  finally 
resolved  to  look  to  literature  for  a  livelihood,  and  fixed 
his  residence  at  Greta  Hall  near  Keswick  ;  and  it  was 
for  domestic  reasons  rather  than  for  the  sake  of  Words- 
worth's society  that  he  chose  this  residence  in  the  Lake 
country — his  acquaintance  with  Wordsworth  being,  in 
fact,  slight,  and  his  sympathy  with  Wordsworth's 
poetical  theories  far  from  intimate.  The  ordinary  cares 
of  this  world  had  a  paramount  hold  on  Southey  in  those 
years,  and  his  foremost  anxiety  was  to  find  the  means 
of  reconciling  them  with  his  poetic  ambition  ;  far  from 
his  thoughts  was  any  idea  of  sharing  as  a  sworn  con- 
federate in  another  man's  mission.  It  was  chance,  and 
not  community  of  aim  or  community  of  sentiment,  that 
brought  the  three  poets  together  in  their  early  man- 
hood. There  can  be  no  confederacy  without  a  leader, 
and  these  three  were  too  strong  in  their  energies  and 
distinct  in  their  individualities  to  submit  one  to 
another's  purposes  in  life.  The  links  between  them 
were  slight  and  transient,  and  had  all  been  accidentally 
formed  by  Coleridge,  the  man  of  many  projects  and 
quickly  kindled  generous  sympathy  with  the  works  of 
others,  all  the  freer  in  its  play  that  he  had  no  very 
definite  work  of  his  own.  But  the  contemporary 
"Edinburgh  Reviewer"  could  not  be  aware  of  these 
details  which  have  been  disclosed  to  posterity  ;  and 
several  superficial  facts  were  in  his  favor  when  he  coined 
the  nickname  of  the  Lake  School. 

Of  the  three,  Coleridge  and  Wordsworth,  though  as 
different  as  possible  in  character,  had  most  in  common 
in  their  views  of  poetry.  The  doctrines  of  the  Preface 
most  probably  took  shape  in  Wordsworth's  mind  during 
those  long  walks  and  talks  with  Coleridge  in  the  summer 
of  1797  to  which  I  have  before  alluded.     There  can  be 


210  COLERIDGE 

no  doubt  that  his  friendship  with  Coleridge  in  their 
early  manhood  Avas  a  most  important  influence  in  the 
development  of  Wordsworth's  mental  and  poetic  life. 
There  is  a  marked  difference  between  what  he  wrote 
before  and  after.  I  would  even  go  so  far,  arguing  from 
the  precision  with  which  Wordsworth  uses  psychological 
terms  in  the  Preface,  that  not  a  little  of  his  theory  was 
consciously  or  unconsciously  derived  from  Coleridge. 
And  the  basis  of  my  argument  would  be  this  :  Words- 
worth was  not  a  reader  of  philosophy,  and  he  professed 
to  detest  mental  analysis  ;  yet  the  analysis  of  the  crea- 
tive faculty  in  the  Preface  is  at  once  profound  and  clear. 
Coleridge,  on  the  other  hand,  had  a  passion  for  philos- 
ophy ;  his  quick  and  subtle  intellect  revelled  in  its 
intricacies  ;  it  was  his  delight  before  poetry  even  when 
he  was  a  school-boy,  and  when  he  was  an  old  man  he 
could  hardly  be  brought  to  converse  on  any  other  sub- 
ject. Only  the  year  before  he  sought  the  acquaintance 
of  Wordsworth,  the  first  son  born  to  him,  the  ill-starred 
Hartley  Coleridge,  had  been  named  after  the  English 
philosopher  whose  technical  language  is  used  throughout 
Wordsworth's  Preface,  not  without  the  awkwardness 
and  crabbedness  that  comes  from  want  of  familiarity. 
Coleridge  was  saturated  with  Hartley's  psychology  when 
he  and  Wordsworth  first  met  ;  and  when  he  was  full  of 
a  subject,  his  eloquence  about  it  was  unmatchedly  rich 
and  full.  A  new  Plato  would  find  admirable  subjects 
for  imaginary  dialogues  in  these  conversations  between 
Coleridge  and  Wordsworth  when  they  met  almost  daily 
for  a  whole  year.  Only  Plato  himself  could  hardly 
have  done  justice  to  the  abundance  and  eloquence,  the 
wide  discursiveness,  of  Coleridge's  talk.  Carlyle  saw 
and  heard  him  in  his  old  age,  and  has  left  a  description 
that  is  often  quoted  : 

"  I  have  heard  Coleridge  talk  with  eager  musical  energy  two 
stricken  hours,  his  face  radiant  and  moist,  and  communicate 
no  meaning  whatsoever  to  any  individual  of  his  hearers,  certain 


HIS    ELOQUENCE  211 

of  whom,  I  for  one,  still  kept  eagerly  listening  in  hope  ;  the  most 
had  long  before  given  up  and  formed,  if  the  room  was  large 
enough,  secondary  humming  groups  of  their  own.  .  .  You 
swam  and  fluttered  in  the  mistiest,  wide,  unintelligible  deluge  of 
things,  for  most  part  in  a  rather  profitless  uncomfortable  manner. 
Glorious  islets  too  I  have  seen  rise  out  of  the  haze,  but  they  were 
few,  and  soon  swallowed  in  the  general  element  again.  Balmy 
sunny  islets,  islets  of  the  blest,  and  the  intelligible  ; — on  which 
occasions  those  secondary  humming  groups  woidd  all  cease  hum- 
ming and  hang  breathless  upon  the  eloquent  words,  till  once  your 
islet  got  wrapt  in  the  mist  again,  and  they  would  recommence 
humming.  Eloquent,  artistically  expansive  words,  you  had 
always ;  piercing  radiances  of  a  most  subtle  insight  came  at 
intervals." 


Part  of  this  unir.telligibility  may  have  been  due  to 
the  listener,  for  Coleridge  in  his  Highgate  days  spoke 
in  what  was  to  Carlyle  an  unknown  tongue — the  philo- 
sophical dialect  of  modern  Germany.  Those  who  knew 
him  in  his  youth  heard  him  converse  on  more  intelligible 
subjects,  and  speak  of  his  eloquence  as  a  marvel.  And 
that  his  eloquence  quickened  "Wordsworth's  whole  poetic 
nature,  and  set  him  thinking  with  new  energy  about 
poetry,  I  have  not  the  least  doubt ;  and  I  think  it  highly 
probable  that  the  doctrines  of  the  Preface  shaped  them- 
selves in  his  mind  as  he  listened  to  Coleridge's  ever- 
flowing  talk.  In  restating  some  of  these  doctrines  in 
the  "  Biographia  Literaria,"  with  such  fulness  of  illus- 
tration and  such  explanations  and  verbal  corrections  that 
they  have  become  part  of  the  critical  creed,  Coleridge 
was  probably  only  reclaiming  what  had  once  been  his 
own.  Why,  then,  you  may  ask,  did  he  not  say  so?  To 
answer  this  question  is  to  recall  the  character  of  the 
man.  Absorbed  in  a  subject  one  day,  and  violently 
pouring  out  his  thick-coming  thoughts  about  it,  he 
would  have  not  the  slightest  remembrance  of  what  he 
had  said  a  short  time  afterward,  when  another  subject 
had  taken  possession  of  him.  A  verbatim  report  of  his 
conversation  one  year  might  have  been  passed  off  on 


212  COLERIDGE 

him  next  year  as  the  production  of  another  mind.  He 
lias  been  accused,  and  Ave  must  admit  convicted,  of 
extensive  plagiarisms  both  in  his  poetry  and  his  philos- 
ophy ;  if  any  body  had  plagiarized  from  himself,  he 
would  never  have  detected  the  fact.  He  never  paused  to 
think  what  was  his  and  what  was  not,  but  gave  all  his 
powers  of  memory  and  imagination  to  whatever  was 
uppermost  in  his  thoughts  at  the  time.  I  do  not  say 
that  Wordsworth  plagiarized  from  him,  but  it  seems  to 
me  impossible  to  overrate  the  quickening  influence  that 
Wordsworth  owed  to  his  contact  with  this  wonderful 
enthusiast. 

The  debt  was  not  all  on  one  side.  It  was  during  the 
memorable  year  of  his  companionship  with  Wordsworth 
that  Coleridge  wrote  nearly  every  thing  that  now  remains 
as  a  measure  of  his  wonderful  poetic  gifts.  "  The 
Rime  of  the  Ancient  Mariner  "  and  "  Christabel  "  were 
both  written  in  that  year,  besides  most  of  the  short 
poems  that  make  up  the  small  volume  of  his  poetical 
works.  The  presence  by  his  side  of  the  steady,  resolute 
will  of  the  Westmoreland  dalesman  seems  to  have  for 
the  time  constrained  his  imagination  from  aimless 
wandering  ;  and  the  lofty,  unwavering  self-confidence  of 
his  friend  inspired  him  wilh  a  similar  energy.  Away 
from  Wordsworth  after  that  year  he  lost  himself  in 
visions  of  work  to  be  done  that  always  remained  to  be 
done.  Coleridge  had  every  poetic  gift  but  one — the 
will  for  sustained  and  concentrated  effort. 

One  cannot  help  lamenting  that  the  gift  of  resolute 
will  was  wanting  in  Coleridge.  And  if  we  make  the 
lament  for  him,  it  is  well  founded,  for  all  the  second 
half  of  his  life  was  made  unhappy  by  vainly  renewed 
repentances  for  wasted  opportunities.  There  is  not  a 
more  pathetic  poem  in  the  language,  to  those  who  know 
the  two  men,  than  the  poem  written  by  Coleridge  Avhen 
his  heart  was  full  after  hearing  Wordsworth  recite  to 
him  "  The  Prelude  " — on  the  growth  of  a  poet's  mind. 


THE  CHARM  OF  COLERIDGE 's  POETRY      213 

"  Ah,  as  I  listened  with  a  heart  forlorn 
The  pulses  of  my  being  beat  anew  ; 
And  even  as  life  returns  upon  the  drown'd 
Life's  joy  rekindling  roused  a  throng  of  pains — 
Keen  pangs  of  love,  awakening  as  a  babe 
Turbulent,  with  an  outcry  in  the  heart ; 
And  fears  self-willed,  that  shunned  the  eye  of  hope  ; 
And  hope  that  scarce  would  know  itself  from  fear  ; 
Sense  of  past  youth,  and  manhood  come  in  vain  ; 
And  genius  given,  and  knowledge  won  in  vain  ; 
And  all  which  I  had  culled  in  wood-walks  wild, 
And  all  which  patient  toil  had  reared,  and  all, 
Commune  with  thee  had  opened  out — but  flowers 
Strewed  on  my  corse  and  borne  upon  my  bier 
In  the  same  coffin,  for  the  self-same  grave  ! 
That  way  no  more  !  and  ill  beseems  it  me, 
"Who  came  a  welcomer  in  herald's  guise, 
Singing  of  glory  and  futurity, 
To  wander  back  on  such  unhealthf  ul  road, 
Plucking  the  poisons  of  self-harm  !    And  ill 
Such  intertwine  beseems  triumphal  wreaths 
Strewed  before  thy  advancing  ! 

•  •  •  • 

And  when — O  Friend  !  my  comforter  and  guide  ! 

Strong  in  thyself,  and  powerful  to  give  strength, — 

Thy  long-sustained  song  finally  closed, 

And  thy  deep  voice  had  ceased — yet  thou  thyself 

Wert  still  before  my  eyes,  and  round  us  both 

That  happy  vision  of  beloved  faces — 

Scarce  conscious,  and  yet  conscious  of  its  close 

I  sate,  my  being  blended  in  one  thought 

(Thought  was  it  ?  or  aspiration  ?  or  resolve  ?) 

Absorbed,  yet  hanging  still  upon  the  sound — 

And  when  I  rose,  I  found  myself  in  prayer." 

The  charm  of  Coleridge's  poetry  is  the  special  and 
inalienable  charm  of  the  art,  the  delight  of  new  and 
melodious  combinations.  When  the  poetry  is  not 
emanative,  the  movement  of  the  thought  is  entirely 
governed  by  feeling.  "  Christabel "  is  a  fragment  of 
most  wonderful  quality,  and  exhibits  another  singular 
feature  of  Coleridge's  poetry — his  marvellous  power  of 
touching  the  sense  of  the«supernatural, 


214  SOUTIIEY 

It  was  through  Coleridge  that  Wordsworth  made  the 
acquaintance  of  Southey,  a  man  who  had  very  little 
intellectual  sympathy  with  either  of  the  other  two  mem- 
bers of  the  supposed  Triad  of  Lake  Poets.  He  was  a 
young  man  of  twenty  at  Balliol  College  in  Oxford  when 
Coleridge,  always  craving  for  the  company  of  congenial 
comrades,  introduced  himself.  Coleridge,  two  years 
older,  had  just  broken  off  a  second  period  of  keeping 
terms  at  Cambridge,  and  had  already  had  several 
characteristic  adventures,  the  most  notable  of  which 
was  the  freak  of  enlisting  as  a  dragoon.  He  had  con- 
tracted some  debts  at  Cambridge,  and  this  was  his  mode 
of  evading  his  responsibilities.  He  took  the  name  of 
Silas  Thompson  Comberbatch,  filling  out  his  own  initials 
S.  T.  C,  and,  according  to  the  most  authentic  form  of 
the  story,  was  discovered  to  be  something  more  than  he 
seemed  by  writing  a  Latin  quotation  on  the  wall  of  the 
stable.  When  he  was  discovered,  his  friends  were  com- 
municated with,  and  he  obtained  his  discharge  ;  but  he 
did  not  take  kindly  to  Cambridge  afterward,  and  when 
he  called  upon  Southey,  his  head  was  full  of  a  wild 
scheme  for  establishing  a  small  community  under  a  new 
form  of  government  in  some  remote  part  of  America. 
Pantisocracy  was  to  be  the  name  given  to  this  new 
model  of  a  happy  state,  and  the  essence  of  the  plan  was 
that  the  members  of  the  small  community,  having  pur- 
chased a  tract  of  land,  should  raise  with  their  own 
hands  the  necessaries  of  life,  while  their  wives — mar- 
riage was  indispensable  for  a  Pantisocrat — should  look 
after  the  household  and  the  children.  All  goods  were 
to  be  in  common,  and  the  plan  differed  from  ordinary 
communism  only  in  this,  that  the  men  were  all  to  de- 
vote a  large  part  of  their  time  to  the  cultivation  of  liter- 
ature. Half  the  day,  Coleridge  calculated,  would  suffice 
for  the  provision  of  simple  food  and  clothes  ;  the  rest 
was  to  be  given  to  high  thinking  and  poetry.  Though 
Coleridge  afterward  became  the  leading  mind  among 


PANTISOCRACY  215 

the  philosophical  Tories,  and  Southey  a  bitter  and 
unscrupulous  partisan  on  the  same  side,  both  were  then 
enthusiastically  stirred  by  the  French  Revolution. 
Such  was  the  temper  of  the  youth  of  the  time,  excited 
to  a  degree  that  we  can  hardly  understand  now  by  this 
startling  event,  that  Coleridge  and  Southey  together  suc- 
ceeded in  beating  up  no  less  than  five  other  recruits. 
We  can  imagine  how  Coleridge  luxuriated  in  picturing 
all  the  advantages  of  this  scheme,  the  heights  to  which 
poetry  could  be  carried  by  minds  rendered  healthy  by 
open-air  exercise  and  freed  from  all  cares  by  the  sim- 
plicity of  their  wants ;  we  can  imagine  how,  priding 
himself  on  being  above  all  things  a  practical  man, 
he  calculated  in  exact  figures  the  yield  of  an  aver- 
age man's  labor  per  hour,  discussed  the  allowance  to 
be  made  for  the  fertility  of  the  virgin  soil,  compared 
the  merits  of  different  regions  of  the  great  conti- 
nent, cited  facts  from  the  books  of  travellers,  ap- 
portioned the  duties  of  the  different  members  of  the 
community,  and  with  eloquent  ingenuity  argued  away 
every  difficulty  that  could  be  started.  But  there 
was  one  difficulty  that  could  not  be  argued  away — 
the  want  of  money.  All  the  recruits  of  Pantisocracy 
were  poor — in  fact,  absolutely  impecunious.  The  en- 
thusiasts, however,  were  fertile  in  resources  for  provid- 
ing the  necessary  supply.  They  so  impressed  a  Bristol 
bookseller,  Cottle,  a  good-hearted,  generous  man  in  spite 
of  his  name,  that  he  gave  them  money  for  their  poems, 
and  promised  more.  They  gave  public  lectures  in 
Bristol  on  literature,  history,  and  politics,  which  drew 
crowded  audiences,  it  is  said,  till  one  evening  Coleridge 
failed  to  put  in  an  appearance.  But  with  all  their 
efforts, — and  Coleridge's  were  probably  greater  in  plan- 
ning than  in  executing,  for  he  had  a  rooted  aversion  to 
regular  labor, — with  all  their  efforts,  the  Pantisocrats 
never  raised  funds  enough  to  give  their  system  of 
government  a  chance  in  practice.     Three  of  them,  in- 


216  SOUTHEY 

deed,  took  one  step  toward  realizing  it,  by  providing 
themselves  with  wives.  There  was  a  family  of  pretty 
and  amiable  sisters  in  Bristol  of  the  name  of  Flicker, 
and  Lovell,  Southey,  and  Coleridge  married  one  each. 
Then  an  uncle  of  Southey's  intervened,  and  carried  him 
off  to  Portugal  for  a  time.  There  the  history  of  Pan- 
tisocracy  ends.  Southey  returned  from  Portugal  with 
other  aims,  and  Coleridge,  though  angry  at  first  at  his 
desertion,  soon  drifted  off  contentedly  into  other  engross- 
ing occupations  for  his  fertile  imagination.  His  beset- 
ting sin  of  irresolution  never  left  him,  with  the  result 
that,  on  his  death  in  1834,  he  left  behind  him  a  great 
reputation,  but  only  fragments  to  support  it — fragments, 
however,  whicli  fully  justified  the  admiration  of  his 
contemporaries. 


CHAPTER  XV 

CAMPBELL — MOORE 

CAMPBELL — "  PLEASURES  OF  HOPE  " — THOMAS  MOORE — THE  LAST 
OP  THE  JOCULATORS  —  MOORE'S  SOCIAL  ENVIRONMENT  —  HIS 
JOCOSE  AND  MAUDLIN  VEINS 

The  great  poets  who  made  the  beginning  of  the  nine- 
teenth century  famous  appeared  above  the  horizon  one 
after  another  in  quick  succession.  In  the  same  year  in 
which  the  volume  of  "  Lyrical  Ballads  "  was  issued  by 
a  Bristol  publisher,  a  poem  was  published  in  Edinburgh 
and  received  throughout  the  country  with  much  less 
mixed  approbation.  This  was  the  "Pleasures  of 
Hope,"  the  work  of  a  still  younger  man  than  either 
Wordsworth  or  Coleridge,  Thomas  Campbell,  a  youth 
of  one-and-twenty,  uncertain  at  the  time  as  to  his  career, 
and  himself  alternating  so  violently  between  despair 
and  hope  when  he  thought  of  the  future  that  his 
friends  were  disposed  at  times  to  doubt  his  sanity.  It  is 
significant  that  both  these  publications  of  the  dawn  of  a 
new  period  came  from  the  provinces.  In  Campbell's 
work,  which  is  known  to  every  school-boy  and  school-girl 
in  lines  and  extracts,  but  which  nobody  reads  now  as  a 
whole  except  under  some  other  compulsion  than  the 
fascination  of  the  poetry,  there  were  no  signs  of  a  dis- 
position to  break  with  the  past  either  in  form  or  in 
choice  of  subject.  Akenside,  fifty  years  before,  had 
sung  the  "  Pleasures  of  the  Imagination,"  and  Samuel 
Rogers,  following  him,  had  in  1793  sung  the  "Pleasures 
of  Memory,"  and  the  happy  thought  occurred  to  young 
Campbell,  suggested  apparently  by  a  jocular  passage  in 
a  friend's  letter,  of  continuing  the  series.     Hope  was  in 

217 


218  CAMPBELL 

like  manner  personified,  and  apostrophized,  and  glori- 
fied as  a  beneficent  principle,  with  illustrations  drawn 
from  savage  life  and  from  civilized  life — from  the 
whole  range  of  history  and  the  whole  circle  of  the  arts 
and  the  sciences.  So  far  there  was  an  intenser  per- 
sonal feeling  at  the  beginning  of  Campbell's  poem, 
inasmuch  as  he  had  little  pleasure  in  life  except  the 
pleasure  of  hope  when  the  subject  occurred  to  him  ;  but 
this  feeling  had  but  little  shaping  influence  on  the  com- 
position. The  successive  incidents  in  the  poem  do  not 
follow  in  any  natural  train  of  excited,  impassioned 
reflection  ;  they  might  have  been  treated  separately  and 
fitted  together  by  mechanical  forces,  the  principle  of 
arrangement  being  the  rhetorical  principle  of  affording 
variety  to  the  reader.  The  versification  and  the  diction 
imitated  the  most  approved  models  of  the  eighteenth 
century  ;  there  are  passages  that  recall  Goldsmith,  and 
passages  that  recall  Pope.  Darwin,  the  author  of  the 
"Botanic  Garden,"  is  generally  regarded  as  having 
carried  the  style  of  Pope  and  Goldsmith  to  ridiculous 
excess.  There  was  sufficient  freshness  in  Campbell's 
work  as  a  whole  to  save  him  from  this  reproach.  The 
whole  work  gives  an  impression  of  abundant  intellectual 
power  and  abundant  poetic  sensibility.  Yet  bits  might 
be  taken  from  the  "  Botanic  Garden  "  and  bits  from 
the  "  Pleasures  of  Hope,"  and  when  they  were  put  side 
by  side,  a  reader  familiar  with  both  writers  would  find 
it  difficult  to  decide  which  was  Campbell's  and  which 
was  Darwin's. 

Campbell  afterward  did  much  better  work  than  the 
"Pleasures  of  Hope";  and  there  is  a  story  told  of  his 
state  of  mind  just  before  its  publication  that  illustrates 
better  than  volumes  of  commentary  how  this  most 
approved  style  in  which  he  wrote  was  beginning  to  pall 
even  on  those  who  could  not  see  their  way  to  a  better. 
While  he  was  engaged  in  revising  the  proofs  of  it,  he 
one  evening  entered  the  rooms  of  a  friend  of  his,  who 


THE    POET'S    EXCITABLE    TEMPERAMENT  219 

has  recorded  the  circumstance,  sat  down  before  the  fire 
with  a  face  of  angry  discontent,  and  without  speaking 
a  word  took  up  the  poker  and  began  tracing  figures  in 
the  soot  on  the  back  of  the  chimney.  Presently  he 
turned  round  and  addressed  his  astonished  friend  in  the 
most  insulting  language.  Not  being  answered  accord- 
ing to  his  folly,  he  turned  after  a  time  upon  what 
proved  to  be  the  source  of  his  strange  behavior,  his  own 
poem.  He  had  been  reading  the  proofs  of  it  all  day, 
mending  and  polishing  the  lines  till  all  meaning  seemed 
to  have  gone  out  of  them,  and  the  whole  composition 
struck  him  as  trash.  "There  are  days,"  he  went  on, 
"  when  I  can't  abide  to  walk  in  the  sunshine,  and  when 
I  would  almost  rather  be  shot  than  come  within  the 
sight  of  any  man,  to  be  spoken  to  by  any  mortal.  This 
has  been  one  of  those  days.  How  heartily  I  wished  for 
night."  He  spent  the  evening  with  his  friend,  and 
after  some  hours  the  fit  of  despondency  was  followed 
by  a  fit  of  wild  mirth,  in  which  he  proclaimed  his 
assurance  that  the  poem  would  make  him  at  once  a 
great  man,  and  gravely  decided  how  and  where  he 
should  live  when  this  gi-eatness  was  achieved. 

It  would  be  easy  to  make  too  much  of  such  violent 
fluctuations  of  mood  in  a  sensitive  youth,  unstrung  and 
distempered  by  overwork  as  Campbell  then  was.  But 
we  may  well  contrast  this  sensitive  uncertainty  and  the 
steady,  assured  confidence  with  which  about  the  same 
time  Wordsworth  and  Coleridge  were  putting  in  execu- 
tion their  definitely  conceived  poetic  ideals.  One  of 
them  at  least,  the  one  who  did  most  solid  work,  had  no 
alternations  between  extravagant  self-confidence  and 
extravagant  despair.  With  all  allowance  for  Campbell's 
temperament  and  circumstances,  I  should  be  inclined  to 
attribute  a  large  part  of  his  faltering  and  misgiving  and 
impatience  with  his  own  work  to  his  perceiving  by  fits 
and  starts  that  this  elaborately  contrived  fabric  of  finely 

ornamented  shreds  and  patches  embodied  an  artificial 

18 


220  CAMPBELL 

sentiment,  and  did  not  express  feelings  to  which  he 
longed  to  give  vent.  He  was  a  man  of  quick  and  strong 
feelings,  but  in  his  expression  of  them  he  was  hampered 
by  respect  for  the  decayed  gentility  of  literary  tradition. 
He  was  afraid  to  move  freely  in  the  dress  of  elevated 
diction  sanctioned  by  Pope's  authority  as  de  rigueur  the 
poet's  raiment  ;  he  was  too  self-conscious  of  it  ;  the 
thought  of  how  his  feelings  would  look  in  it  trammelled 
their  natural  movements. 

The  truth  is  that  beneath  the  smooth  and  glossy 
artificial  Popian  crust  of  the  "  Pleasures  of  Hope  "  there 
was  more  in  it  of  the  spirit  of  the  French  Revolution 
than  we  find  either  in  Wordsworth  or  in  Coleridge. 
The  literary  revolution,  of  which  they  were  recognized 
leaders,  was  a  thing  altogether  apart  from  the  political 
revolution,  not  in  any  direct  way  inspired  by  it — the 
result  of  a  quite  independent  chain  of  causes  ;  in  fact, 
as  I  have  tried  to  show,  not,  strictly  speaking,  a  revolu- 
tion at  all,  but  a  natural  literary  development,  the  roots 
of  which  lay  chronologically  behind  the  political  revolu- 
tion. But  Campbell  was  directly  influenced  in  the  tone 
of  the  thoughts  that  he  expressed  in  verse  by  the  politi- 
cal circumstances  of  his  time.  His  restless  ambitious 
spirit,  by  turns  discontented  and  sanguine,  and  at  all 
times  intensely  sympathetic,  had  more  in  common  with 
the  spirit  then  acting  on  public  affairs  than  either  the 
hard,  self-contained  Wordsworth  or  the  dreamy  and 
speculative  Coleridge — of  imagination  and  speculation 
all  compact,  and  comparatively  indifferent  to  the 
material  on  which  his  faculties  worked.  It  is  curious 
to  trace  the  operation  of  two  antagonistic  forces  in 
Campbell's  mind — the  habit  of  elevated  and  elaborate 
expression,  formed  at  the  University,  in  accordance  with 
the  literary  tradition  of  Pope,  and  the  tempestuous 
energy  of  feeling  fostered  by  the  disturbed  state  of 
public  affairs.  He  was  quite  a  model  student  in  the 
University  of  Glasgow,  standing  high  as  a  scholar  in  his 


THE    "PLEASURES    OF    HOPE  "  221 

classes,  and  winning  prizes  for  English  verse  with  poems 
that  were  pronounced  by  the  professors  far  superior  to 
any  thing  ever  submitted  in  such  competitions.  He 
wrote  an  "  Essay  on  the  Origin  of  Evil "  in  the  style  of 
Pope's  "  Essay  on  Man  "  that  was  considered  an  incom- 
parable imitation  of  the  great  original.  But  Campbell 
was  also  a  leader  in  debating  societies  outside  the 
regular  University  course  ;  and  there,  as  was  natural, 
the  principles  of  the  political  revolution  found  manj'- 
enthusiastic  supporters.  You  know,  I  dare  say,  that  in 
the  nineties  of  last  century  attempts  to  apply  the 
doctrines  of  liberty,  equality,  and  fraternity  were  sup- 
pressed in  Scotland  with  extraordinary  severity.  Three 
gentlemen, — Palmer,  Gerald,  and  Muir, — in  whose  mem- 
ory a  monument  now  stands  in  the  Calton  Burying- 
ground,  were  transported  to  Botany  Bay  for  an  offence 
in  the  way  of  agitation  which,  under  the  English  law, 
was  punishable  only  with  a  short  term  of  imprisonment. 
Campbell,  when  a  boy  of  sixteen,  walked  all  the  way 
from  Glasgow  to  hear  one  of  these  men,  Gerald,  a  man 
of  remarkable  eloquence,  defend  himself  on  his  trial. 
The  speech  and  the  subsequent  conviction  made  a  great 
impression  on  the  sensitive  youth — so  great  an  impres- 
sion that  his  friends  thought  it  had  unsettled  his  reason, 
such  was  the  passion  with  which  he  spoke  against  modern 
society  and  all  its  institutions.  Now,  underneath  the 
smooth  couplets  and  the  dignified  diction  and  imagery 
of  the  "  Pleasures  of  Hope  "  it  is  not  difficult  to  detect 
traces  of  this  deep-seated  passion,  when  we  know  the 
poet's  early  history,  disguised  though  it  is  by  the  con- 
ventional splendor  of  the  expression.  There  is,  for 
example,  the  famous  passage  on  the  Russian  subjugation 
of  Poland,  and  another,  not  so  familiar,  at  the  close  of 
Part  I.,  where  he  denounces  the  plunder  of  India  by 
Warren  Hastings  : 

"  Rich  in  the  gems  of  India's  gaudy  zone, 
And  plunder  piled  from  kingdoms  not  their  own, 


222  CAMPBELL 

Degenerate  trade  !  thy  minions  could  despise 
The  heart-born  anguish  of  a  thousand  cries  ; 
Could  lock  with  impious  hands  their  teeming  store, 
While  famished  nations  died  along  the  shore  ; 
Could  mock  the  groans  of  fellow-men,  and  bear 
The  curse  of  kingdoms  peopled  with  despair  ; 
Could  stamp  disgrace  on  man's  polluted  name, 
And  barter,  with  their  gold,  eternal  shame  ! " 

Or,  again,  the  following  : 

"  Tyrants  !  in  vain  ye  trace  the  wizard  ring  ; 
In  vain  ye  limit  mind's  unwearied  spring  : 
What  !  can  ye  lull  the  winged  winds  asleep, 
Arrest  the  rolling  world,  or  chain  the  deep  ? 
No  ! — the  wild  wave  contemns  your  sceptred  hand  ; 
It  rolled  not  back  when  Canute  gave  command." 

The  literary  quality  of  such  verses  is  not  high;  in  aim- 
ing at  elevated  diction  the  young  poet  approaches 
perilously  near  to  turgid  bombast.  Yet  in  these  verses 
the  spirit  of  the  French  Revolution  speaks  more  plainly 
than  in  any  of  the  productions  of  Wordsworth  or  Cole- 
ridge. They  were  disenchanted,  disillusionized,  before 
they  wrote  about  the  French  Revolution.  If  we  could 
recover  any  of  Coleridge's  lectures  on  Pantisocracy,  we 
might  find  something  like  the  above.  Campbell,  we 
must  remember,  was  only  twenty-one  when  he  wrote  the 
"Pleasures of  Hope";  and,  though  he  pointed  his  moral 
specially  against  Russian  tyranny  in  Poland,  there  shines 
through  his  verse  unmistakable  evidence  of  sympathy 
with  the  motives  and  aspirations  of  revolutionists  else- 
where. The  dress  was  the  dress  of  Pope,  but  the  voice 
was  the  voice  of  a  later  time. 

To  the  force  of  the  habit  of  expression  in  which  he 
had  been  educated  I  should  also  be  disposed  to  attribute 
Campbell's  strange  distrust  of  the  poems  that  have  been 
universally  recognized  as  his  best  and  most  enduring 
work — "Ye  Mariners  of  England,"  "  Hohenlinden," 
"  The  Soldier's  Dream,"  the  "  Battle  of  the  Baltic,"  and 


Campbell's  diffidence  223 

a  few  others.  He  contributed  these  poems  to  the 
Morning  Chronicle  after  he  had  made  a  reputation 
by  the  "  Pleasures  of  Hope,"  and  before  he  settled  in 
London  to  the  more  commonplace  literary  labor  in 
which  he  spent  the  rest  of  his  life.  So  doubtful  was 
Campbell  of  the  value  of  these  lyrics  that  he  would  not 
put  his  name  to  them,  for  fear  of  compromising  the 
reputation  of  the  author  of  the  "  Pleasures  of  Hope." 
Now,  I  should  say  it  was  a  result  of  the  ideas  of  literary 
dignity  in  which  he  had  been  brought  up  that  Campbell 
should  have  feared  that  "Hohenlinden  "  and  "Ye  Mar- 
iners of  England  "  would  appear  too  trifling  for  a  jjoet 
of  the  rank  that  his  first  poem  gave  him.  It  was  an  ex- 
ample of  the  force  of  the  same  restraint  of  habit  that 
kept  Gray  from  "  speaking  out."  Like  Gray,  Campbell 
lacked  the  courage  of  his  imagination.  The  incubus  of 
literary  tradition  lay  heavy  on  him.  He  had  a  distrust- 
ful critic  within,  the  creation  of  scholastic  training, 
which  clung  to  the  skirts  of  his  imagination  and  impeded 
its  freedom  of  movement  whenever  it  tried  to  burst 
away  from  the  beaten  track.  His  diffidence  about 
"  Hohenlinden  "  is  sometimes  quoted  as  an  example  of 
the  saw  that  "genius  is  unconscious  of  its  own  excel- 
lence." But  against  this  must  be  set  the  fact  that  late 
in  life  Campbell  considered  that  "O'Connor's  Child" 
was  his  best  poem,  and  that  in  this  he  has  the  support 
of  most  people  who  are  familiar  with  his  poetry.  It  is 
unlike  his  popular  lyrics,  in  the  fact  that  it  takes  more 
than  one  reading  to  appreciate,  but  it  is  worth  the  trou- 
ble of  reading  more  than  once.  Some  think  that  if 
"  Gertrude  of  Wyoming  "  had  been  published  before  the 
"  Pleasures  of  Hope  "  it  might  have  ranked  as  his  chief 
work,  but  the  subject  is  too  remote  to  have  achieved 
any  great  amount  of  popularity. 

The  year  after  the  publication  of  the  "  Pleasures  of 
Hope,"  another  young  poetic  adventurer,  an  Irishman, 


224  MOORE 

crossed  St.  George's  Channel  with  his  bundle  of  MSS.  in 
search  of  a  publisher  and  subscribers  in  London.  The 
MSS.  in  his  case  were  only  metrical  translations  from  a 
Greek  poet,  Anacreon,  artificial  verses  in  praise  of  love 
and  wine.  Yet  in  a  few  months  this  adventurer,  though 
he  was  only  just  out  of  his  teens,  and  his  father  was 
nothing  more  eminent  than  a  humble  Dublin  grocer  in 
a  small  shop  in  a  small  street,  became  one  of  the  lions 
of  London  society,  and  numbered  the  Prince  of  Wales 
among  the  subscribers  to  a  sumptuous  edition  of  his 
translations.  From  that  time  forward  he  held  a  place 
among  the  most  popular  poets  of  his  generation.  Pub- 
lishers, whose  business  it  is  to  gauge  the  public  estima- 
tion of  writers,  furnish  a  sure  test  of  popularity  at  least, 
however  much  that  may  be  at  variance  with  critical 
verdict,  in  the  prices  that  they  are  willing  to  pay  for 
poems.  And  even  after  Byron  had  appeared  in  the  field, 
when  Mr.  Perry  of  the  Morning  Chronicle  was  negoti- 
ating as  a  friend  with  the  Longmans  the  sale  of  a  work 
by  Thomas  Moore,  he  was  in  a  position  to  stipulate  that 
the  price  should  be  as  high  as  had  ever  been  paid  for 
a  poem  of  the  same  length.  The  poem  was  not  then 
written  or  even  planned  :  it  was  only  understood  that 
the  subject  should  be  Oriental;  and  this  was  the  rate  of 
remuneration  for  which  Moore's  friend  bargained.  For 
so  many  lines,  to  be  paid  for  on  delivery,  the  poet  was  to 
receive  three  thousand  pounds.  Scott  was  paid  this  sum 
for  "  Rokeby,"  and  Perry  argued  that  Moore  could  not 
take  less.  The  publishers  assented,  thereby  showing 
that  Moore  at  the  time  was,  in  their  opinion,  as  popular 
with  the  buyers  of  poetry  as  Scott. 

If  we  were  to  look  for  the  secret  of  Moore's  popu- 
larity in  his  poetry  alone,  Ave  should  be  doing  an  injus- 
tice both  to  him  and  to  the  taste  of  the  generation  with 
whom  he  was  such  a  favorite.  He  was  personally 
popular  ;  he  impressed  society  otherwise  than  by  his 
poems  ;  these  were  but  a  part  of  his  claims  to  admiring 


THE    SECRET    OF    MOOEE's    POTULAKITY  225 

recognition.  If  we  open  a  collection  of  bis  poems  now, 
and  read  his  "  Odes  of  Anacreon,"  to  which  the  Prince 
of  Wales  and  other  notabilities  of  rank  subscribed,  we 
desist  after  a  time  with  something  of  the  disgust  we 
should  feel  at  a  profuse  display  of  pretty,  sham  jewelry. 
The  ample  brimming  bowls  and  goblets  of  wine,  the 
wreaths  and  garlands  of  roses,  the  rich  perfumes,  the 
sparkling  eyes,  and  the  golden  tresses,  and  the  snowy 
necks,  are  well  enough  in  moderation,  but  some  eighty 
odes  of  such  materials  pall  for  lack  of  variety.  Any 
variety  that  there  is  lies  within  the  narrowest  limits  : 
now  it  is  a  bowl  and  now  it  is  a  goblet,  now  we  drink  and 
now  we  quaff,  now  it  is  a  bud  and  now  it  is  a  full-blown 
rose,  now  a  garland  and  now  a  cluster,  now  ringlets  and 
now  tresses  ;  but  it  is  always  wine  and  flower,  with 
little  variation  of  phrase.  We  are  soon  surfeited  with 
such  sentiment,  and  disposed  to  laugh  at  its  artificiality. 
Moore's  prettinesses,  always  expressed  in  soft  and  melo- 
dious verse,  were  probabty  a  pleasant  surprise  to  a  gen- 
eration weary  of  didactic  poems  ;  but  if  we  have  a 
liking  for  such  things  now,  we  can  find  more  genuine 
articles  of  the  same  kind,  compounded  with  much  higher 
art,  in  the  poetry  of  the  seventeenth  century,  the  vol- 
umes of  Queen  Henrietta's  poets,  Lovelace,  and  Carew, 
and  Suckling,  and,  above  all,  Herrick. 

Nor  were  his  original  poems,  published  soon  after 
under  the  pseudonym  of  Tom  Little,  in  the  least  of 
higher  quality.  The}'  were  little  poems,  indeed,  gener- 
ally spun  up  to  some  glittering  conceit,  as  commonplace 
as  it  is  glittering.  No  poet  of  the  eighteenth  century, 
in  the  days  when  the  great  patrons  of  poetry  were  con- 
noisseurs of  the  art,  would  have  dared  to  submit  effu- 
sions so  very  poor  in  thought,  and  vulgar  in  sentiment. 
There  is  a  poem  on  Variety,  for  example.  Variety  is 
the  great  charm  of  nature. 

"Ask  what  prevailing,  pleasing  power, 
Allures  the  sportive,  wandering  hee 


226  MOORE 

To  roam  untired  from  flower  to  flower, 
He'll  tell  you  'tis  variety. 

"  Look  Nature  round,  her  features  trace, 
Her  seasons,  all  her  changes  see  ; 
And  own,  upon  Creation's  face, 
The  greatest  charm's  variety." 

Therefore,  following  nature's  law,  the  poet  will  seek 
variety.  But  no  :  there  is  "  the  nymph  he  loves," 
this  is  "  Patty "  ;  he  can  never  be   false  to  her. 

' '  For  me,  ye  gracious  powers  above  ! 
Still  let  me  roam,  unfixed  and  free  ; 
In  all  things — but  the  nymph  I  love, 
I'll  change  and  taste  variety. 

"  But  Patty,  not  a  world  of  charms 

Could  e'er  estrange  my  heart  from  thee  ; 
No,  let  me  ever  seek  those  arms  : 
There  still  I'll  find  variety." 

What  poor  stuff  is  this  compared  with  Lovelace's  "Para- 
dox," of  which  it  is  a  Brummagem  imitation  : 

"  'Tis  true  the  beauteous  star, 
To  which  I  first  did  bow, 
Burnt  quicker,  brighter  far 
Than  that  which  leads  me  now, 

Which  shines  with  more  delight, 
For  gazing  on  that  light 
So  long,  near  lost  my  sight. 

"  Through  foul,  we  follow  fair. 
For  had  the  world  one  face, 
And  earth  been  bright  as  air, 
We  had  known  neither  place. 
Indians  smell  not  their  nest, 
A  Swiss  or  Finn  tastes  best 
The  spices  of  the  East. 

"  So  from  the  glorious  sun, 
Who  to  his  height  hath  got. 


IMITATION    OF    LOVELACE'S    "  PARADOX  "  227 

With  what  delight  we  run 
To  some  black  cave  or  grot. 
And,  heavenly  Sidney,  you 
Twice  read,  had  rather  view 
Some  odd  romance,  so  new. 

"  The  god  that  constant  keeps 
Unto  his  deities, 
Is  poor  in  joys,  and  sleeps 
Imprisoned  in  the  skies. 

This  knew  the  wisest,  who 
From  Juno  stole  below 
To  love  a  bear  or  cow." 

We  have  seen  Moore  in  his  jocosely  sentimental  vein  ; 
see  him  next  in  his  maudlin  love-sickness. 

"  Have  you  not  seen  the  timid  tear 

Steal  trembling  from  mine  eye  ? 
Have  you  not  marked  the  flush  of  fear, 

Or  caught  the  murmured  sigh  ? 
And  can  you  think  my  love  is  chill, 

Nor  fixed  on  you  alone  ? 
And  can  you  rend  by  doubting  still 

A  heart  so  much  your  own  ? 

"  To  you  my  soul's  affections  move 

Devoutly,  warmly  true  ; 
My  life  has  been  a  task  of  love, 

One  long,  long  thought  of  you. 
If  all  your  tender  faith  be  o'er, 

If  still  my  truth  you'll  try  ; 
Alas  !  I  know  but  one  proof  more, 

I'll  bless  your  name  and  die." 

Such  are  fair  specimens  of  the  poems  of  Tom  Little, 
so  famous  in  their  day,  and  if  we  take  them  as  they  read, 
after  making  all  allowance  for  the  novelty  of  the  strain 
when  they  appeared,  and  for  the  very  slight  interest  in 
poetry  and  consequent  want  of  discrimination  in  London 
society  at  the  time,  we  cannot  but  be  astonished  that  the 
author  should  have  jumped  at  once  into  a  foremost  place, 
even  although  Wordsworth  and  Coleridge  had  so  much 


228  MOORE 

against  them  as  candidates  for  general  favor,  and  Scott 
and  Byron  had  not  yet  appeared  on  the  scene.  But 
the  truth  is  that  it  was  as  a  writer  of  songs  to  be  sung, 
and  not  of  poems  to  be  read,  that  Moore  established  his 
hold  on  the  public  mind;  and  he  was  greatly  helped  by 
his  personal  popularity  in  the  circles  where  the  fashion 
was  set  even  in  poetry.  Many  in  those  days  would  buy 
and  admire  even  a  volume  of  poetry  when  the  name  of 
the  Prince  of  Wales  appeared  at  the  head  of  the  list 
of  subscribers.  But  how  did  Moore,  who  was  not  born 
in  a  palace,  but  in  a  back  street  in  Dublin,  achieve  such 
fashionable  popularity  that  he  secured  the  Prince's 
name  for  his  literary  venture  ?  It  was  chiefly  his  ex- 
quisite singing  of  his  own  songs  that  made  him  the 
rage.  It  is  hardly  an  exaggeration  to  describe  Moore 
as  the  last  of  the  Troubadours,  or,  to  be  more  precise, 
as  the  last  of  the  Joglars,  of  the  men  to  whom  Bishop 
Percy,  by  a  slight  historical  error,  gave  the  name  of 
Minstrels.  These  were,  as  I  dare  say  you  have  heard,  a 
class  of  men  in  the  Middle  Ages  who  sometimes  attached 
themselves  to  a  court,  and  sometimes  wandered  from 
one  feudal  castle  to  another,  welcome  guests  wherever 
they  went  on  account  of  their  skill  in  making  and  re- 
citing or  singing  poems,  and  other  entertaining  quali- 
ties. When  they  were  not  gentlemen  born,  and  rich 
enough  to  amuse  themselves  as  well  as  their  hosts  in 
this  way,  they  owed  their  livelihood  to  the  bounty  of 
their  patrons,  often  receiving  valuable  presents.  They 
were  entitled  to  be  called  Troubadours  or  Inventors  if 
their  own  poetry  was  excellent  ;  and  if  they  could  only 
render  the  poetry  of  others,  their  professional  name  was 
Joglar  or  Joculator.  The  joglar  added  other  entertain- 
ing resources  to  that  of  reciting  poetry;  he  carried 
gossip  from  castle  to  castle,  and  sometimes  was  capable 
of  amusing  his  audience  with  sleight  of  hand  tricks. 
Of  course  the  joglar  might  also  be  a  troubadour.  As 
civilization  developed  and  society  became  more  complex, 


THE   LAST    OF   THE   JOCULATORS  229 

there  was  a  natural  division  of  labor  ;  the  poet  was 
differentiated  as  such,  and  often  received  his  reward 
and  his  means  of  livelihood  in  pensions  from  the  public 
exchequer  and  sinecure  posts  in  the  public  service.  We 
see  this  differentiation  in  full  force  in  the  time  of 
Chaucer.  Now,  Moore  might  be  called  the  last  of  the 
troubadours  or  the  joglars  in  our  country,  partly  because 
he  made  a  poetic  reputation  by  singing  his  own  songs  in 
fashionable  drawing-rooms,  and  partly  because  he  was 
the  last  eminent  English  poet  who  looked  to  his  poetry 
as  an  indirect  means  of  obtaining  a  provision  for  life 
through  the  public  patronage  of  influential  friends.  In 
later  life,  when  he  wrote  a  fragment  of  autobiography, 
he  speaks  of  his  pen  as  having  been  his  sole  means  of 
support  throughout  his  life.  It  was  his  means  of  sup- 
port from  necessity,  and  not  from  choice  ;  it  was  so 
only  after  he  had  been  disappointed  in  his  expectations 
from  another  source  ;  and  even  then  it  was  so  only  par- 
tially. For  the  first  twelve  years  of  his  London  life 
Moore  made  comparatively  little  by  his  pen  ;  indeed, 
he  wrote  very  little,  only  two  small  volumes  of  elegant 
and  sparkling  trifles.  His  chief  steady  source  of  income 
was  an  annuity  of  five  hundred  pounds,  paid  him  by 
the  publisher  Power  for  supplying  words  to  Irish  and 
other  national  melodies.  Moore  used  to  sing  them  in 
the  drawing-rooms  of  his  fashionable  friends  to  give 
them  a  start.  We  must,  of  course,  call  the  composition 
of  these  literary  work,  although  many  of  them  seem 
poor  enough  if  they  are  read,  and  not  sung.  Anyhow, 
they  were  handsomely  paid  for,  the  poet  receiving  his 
annuity  for  them  for  twenty-seven  years — pleasant 
contrast  to  the  melancholy  case  of  Burns,  who  refused 
to  take  any  thing  for  a  similar  service  to  a  Scotch  pub- 
lisher, the  service,  of  course,  not  being  really  worth  so 
much,  seeing  that  Burns's  songs  were  not  fashionable 
songs,  expensively  published.  But  Moore  had  another 
source  of  income,  in  no  way  connected  with  his  pen — a 


230  MOORE 

sinecure  office  in  the  Bermudas  which,  after  the  first 
year,  he  was  able  to  discharge  by  a  deputy.  He  received 
this  appointment  in  1803,  and,  though  it  afterward  proved 
a  source  of  embarrassment  to  him,  owing  to  the  rascality 
of  a  deputy  for  whose  embezzlements  he  was  held  re- 
sponsible, it  brought  him  four  hundred  pounds  a  year  for 
eighteen  years.  For  twelve  years  Moore,  upon  these  re- 
sources, lived  in  London  the  life  of  a  diner-out  in  the 
greatest  request,  in  expectation  of  some  appointment 
more  lucrative  than  his  West  India  registrarship.  These 
expectations,  and  his  chagrin  at  their  repeated  postpone- 
ment and  ultimate  ruin  in  1812,  are  very  frankly  confessed 
in  his  Diary.  Swift's  saying  that  great  men  never  re- 
ward in  a  more  substantial  way  those  whom  they  make 
the  companions  of  their  pleasures  was  verified  in  the 
case  of  Moore.  One  of  his  earliest  patrons,  on  whom  he 
all  along  built  his  best  hopes,  was  Lord  Moira,  a  schol- 
arly peer,  of  generous  but  hesitating  and  irresolute 
temper,  munificent  almost  to  the  point  of  ostentation, 
and  specially  willing  to  befriend  men  of  genius  and 
learning.  He  was  in  power  in  the  Granville  Administra- 
tion of  1806,  and  again  in  the  Liverpool  Administration 
of  1812,  under  which  he  went  out  as  Governor-General 
to  India  ;  but  on  neither  occasion  was  he  able  to  do 
any  thing  for  the  poet.  It  is  somewhat  comical  now  to 
read  Moore's  complaints  of  his  hard  lines  in  not  being 
promoted  to  some  lucrative  post,  without  the  slightest 
qualification  for  filling  it.  He  evidently  regarded  him- 
self as  having  been  very  badly  used  bjr  his  aristocratic 
friends,  and  especially  by  Lord  Moira,  from  whom  he 
had  expected  better  things.  He  repeats  bitterly  Lord 
Moira's  constant  assurance  when  he  gave  any  hint  of 
impatience  :  "  I  am  not  oblivious  of  you.  Depend  upon 
it,  I  am  not  oblivious  of  you."  The  fact  seems  to  have 
been  that  Moira  hesitated  between  posts  that  he  consid- 
ered not  good  enough  to  offer  to  Moore,  and  posts  for 
which,  though  they  were  good  enough,  he  was  obviously 


HIS    INTRODUCTION   TO    LONDON    SOCIETY  231 

unfitted  ;  and  thus  Moore  in  the  end  got  the  allowance  of 
poor  Mother  Hubbard's  dog — nothing,  and  was  obliged 
to  fall  back  on  literature  for  a  livelihood. 

"How  it  was,"  Mrs.  Oliphant  says,  "that  the  little 
Irishman  from  Dublin,  who  came  across  the  Channel 
with  a  few  introductions  and  some  translations  from 
Anacreon  in  his  pocket,  scrambled  into  good  society,  it 
is  somewhat  difficult  to  make  out."  It  is  difficult  indeed, 
if  we  think  only  of  the  social  interval  between  his 
father's  little  shop  in  Dublin,  whicli  the  poet  euphemisti- 
cally calls  a  wine-store,  and  the  fashionable  drawing- 
rooms  in  which  he  so  quickly  became  a  favorite.  But 
his  fragment  of  autobiography,  which  ends  with  his 
introduction  to  London  society,  and  looks  as  if  it  had 
been  written  to  explain  the  paradox,  shows  him  to  us  in 
intermediate  stages,  through  which  the  transition  was 
as  easy  and  natural  as  any  other  process  of  evolution. 
Young  Moore  and  his  songs  were  the  rage  in  the  best 
society  of  Dublin  before  they  were  the  rage  in  the  best 
society  in  London,  and  there  were  links  between  the 
two  along  which  the  modern  troubadour  slid  in  the 
easiest  manner  possible,  making  good  his  footing  in  the 
new  fields  of  social  conquest  by  the  same  agreeable, 
entertaining  qualities  that  had  served  him  in  the  city 
of  his  birth.  "In  anecdote,  small-talk,  and  especially 
in  singing,  he  was  supreme — for  many  years  he  had 
been  the  most  brilliant  man  in  his  company,"  says  Henry 
Crabb  Robinson  of  him  in  his  famous  London  days. 
Pie  had  shown  the  same  supremacy,  and  asserted  it  with 
the  same  good-sense,  modesty,  and  quiet  dignity,  before 
he  left  Dublin.  But  how  did  he  acquire  the  tone  of 
polite  metropolitan  society  in  anecdote,  small-talk,  and 
singing?  Irishmen,  from  their  geniality,  frankness, 
love  of  fun,  and  general  willingness  to  please  and  be 
pleased,  are  naturally  agreeable  companions  :  but  what 
amuses  in  the  back-parlor  of  a  Dublin  wine-store  could 
not  reasonably  be  expected  to  amuse  a  more  fastidious 


232  MOORE 

audience  with  different  interests  and  different  ways  of 
life.  The  autobiography,  however,  explains  this  puzzle 
also.  Moore's  mother  was  his  presiding  good  genius, 
and  it  is  one  of  the  finest  traits  in  a  character  that  has 
many  lovable  features  that  to  the  last  he  retained  his 
affection  for  her,  and  among  all  his  fine  friends  never 
lost  an  opportunity  of  making  her  life  pleasant.  "  It 
was  from  the  first,"  he  says,  "  my  poor  mother's  ambi- 
tion, though  with  no  undue  aspirings  for  herself,  to 
secure  for  her  children  an  early  footing  in  the  better 
walks  of  society  ;  and  to  her  constant  attention  to  this 
object  I  owe  both  my  taste  for  good  company  and  the 
facility  I  afterward  found  in  adapting  myself  to  that 
sphere."  She  was  helped  in  this  purpose  by  the  religion 
of  the  family.  They  were  Roman  Catholics,  and,  as 
always  happens  with  a  proscribed  sect,  there  was  a  close 
union  between  their  various  ranks.  We  have  seen  how 
the  same  circumstance  operated  in  the  life  of  Pope.  It 
was  easier  for  Mrs.  Moore  to  get  her  children  into  the 
better  walks  of  society  than  if  she  had  been  a  Protestant. 
The  future  poet  was  a  lively  and  precocious  child,  and 
social  superiors  began  to  covet  his  company  at  a  very 
early  age.  Decayed  gentlewomen,  punctiliously  correct 
in  manners,  yet  gay  and  sprightly  in  conversation,  as 
only  Irish  maiden  ladies  can  be,  made  much  of  him  as 
an  engaging  prodigy,  and  invited  him  to  their  tea-parties. 
He  was  sent  to  the  best  school  in  Dublin  ;  and  school- 
fellows, whose  fathers  were  richer  than  his  own,  invited 
him  to  spend  the  vacations  at  their  homes.  Although 
the  conspiracy  of  the  United  Irishmen  was  being  formed 
at  the  time  in  the  Irish  capital,  there  was  no  outward 
sign  of  discontent;  life  went  merrily  with  singing- 
parties,  dancing-parties,  and  supper-parties.  There 
was  a  rage,  too,  at  the  time  for  private  theatricals  ;  and 
Moore's  school-master,  as  it  happened,  was  a  leader  in 
such  entertainments,  managing  the  stage,  writing  pro- 
logues and  epilogues,  and  giving  lessons  in  elocution. 


*  *    T     ATT     4         T>/-krkT."TT    " 


LALLA    ROOKII  233 

In  the  art  of  recitation  Moore  was  his  show-boy,  and 
when  he  was  eleven  years  old,  was  selected  to  speak 
the  epilogue  in  a  performance  of  "  Jane  Shore  "  at  the 
private  theatre  of  a  Lady  Borrowes — the  first  of  the 
many  women  of  title  who  figure  in  the  story  of  the 
poet's  life.  Then,  fortunately  for  him,  just  as  he  was 
fourteen  and  ready  for  the  University,  the  prohibition 
against  Catholics  was  removed,  and  he  was  admitted 
to  Trinity  College.  There  he  distinguished  himself  by 
his  facility  in  writing  English  verse,  and  made  more 
acquaintances  in  "the  better  walks  of  society."  By  this 
time,  too,  he  had  begun  to  write  songs  as  well  as  to  sing 
them  ;  and  as  he  always  sang  to  his  own  accompaniment 
on  the  piano,  and  came,  as  he  says,  to  be  dependent  on 
it,  he  was  saved  thereby  from  the  solicitations  of  jolly 
good  fellows  to  join  companies  where  there  was  no  such 
instrument,  while  he  was  all  the  greater  an  acquisition 
in  the  "  better  walks."  He  had  also  the  run  of  a  large 
library,  where  he  acquired  a  great  store  of  miscellaneous 
scholarship  which  secured  him  the  attention  of  the  Prov- 
ost of  the  College.  "  The  Provost's  house,"  he  says, 
"was  the  resort  of  the  best  society  in  Dublin,  and  his 
wife  and  daughters  were  lovely,  literary,  and  fond  of 
music."  Thus  it  happened  that  before  he  left  Dublin, 
at  the  age  of  nineteen,  to  enter  at  the  Middle  Temple  in 
London  and  get  his  Anacreon  published,  Moore,  though 
only  the  son  of  the  keeper  of  a  wine-store,  had  been 
expressly  invited  to  dinner  to  meet  no  less  a  person  than 
Lord  Clare,  the  Chancellor  of  the  University.  He  was 
coveted  by  the  best  society  then,  as  afterward,  for  his 
own  qualities  as  an  agreeable,  well-bred  companion. 

Of  all  his  writings  it  is  still  to  the  songs  that  we  must 
go  to  know  him  at  his  best.  The  Oriental  charms  of 
"  Lalla  Rookh  "  become  tiresome  as  we  get  older,  and 
as  we  begin  to  look  critically  at  the  art  of  the  com- 
position. The  poem  was  not  composed  in  a  poetic 
spirit,  and  there  is  very  little  poetry  in  it.     It  is  rather 


234  MOORE 


an  artificial  putting  together  of  words  and  imagery 
than  real  poetry,  and  it  was  felt  as  such  by  his  contem- 
poraries. They  enlarged  on  the  wonderful  fidelity  of 
his  pictures  to  life,  and,  like  Sir  John  Malcolm,  could 
hardly  believe  that  the  poet  had  not  been  in  the  East. 
This  is  not,  however,  a  strictly  poetical  quality.  Moore 
deliberately  set  himself  to  read  up  his  subject,  and  in 
the  poem  he  used  imagery  only  that  would  be  intel- 
ligible to  an  Oriental.  Had  he  been  writing  poetry  for 
Orientals,  this  would  have  been  all  right,  but  it  is  all 
wrong  for  us,  and  Moore  had  to  burden  his  poem  with 
explanatory  notes. 

The  last  years  of  his  life  wTere  spent  in  writing  a 
History  of  Ireland,  now  quite  unknown.  He  persisted 
in  this  work,  and  this  gives  us  a  higher  idea  of  his 
character.  With  all  his  apparent  affectation  he  was  a 
genuine  patriot,  an  industrious  worker,  and  a  most  ex- 
emplary son  and  husband,  and  there  is  no  doubt  that  it 
was  these  qualities  that  helped  to  make  him  the  darling 
of  the  London  drawing-rooms. 


CHAPTER    XYI 

SCOTT 
INFLUENCE    OP    OLD    BALLADS — SUMMAEY    OF    LIFE — POEMS 

Although  the  French  Revolution,  in  my  opinion,  had 
no  influence  on  our  poets,  beyond,  perhaps,  making  them 
feel  a  certain  exaltation  of  energy  as  belonging  to  a 
time  of  great  events, — an  impulse  that  would  carry  no- 
body far  except  along  a  road  on  which  he  was  prepared 
otherwise  to  travel, — it  is  worth  noticing  that  all  the 
eminent  poets  of  the  time  had  personal  experience, 
more  or  less  accidental,  of  the  consequences  of  the 
Revolution.  The  consequences,  in  fact,  were  so  wide- 
spread throughout  the  length  and  breadth  of  the  coun- 
try that  it  was  difficult  for  any  body  to  avoid  encoun- 
tering them  at  one  turn  or  another.  The  adventure  of 
Wordsworth  and  Coleridge  was  the  most  curious  ;  but 
all  were  characteristic  of  the  time  of  suspicion,  espion- 
age, conspiracy,  pi'osecution,  and  preparation  in  self- 
defence  brought  upon  this  country  by  fears  of  a  similar 
domestic  revolution,  and  of  invasion  from  our  aggres- 
sive revolutionized  neighbor.  Coleridge  had  rendered 
himself  a  suspicious  character  by  his  Pantisocracy  and 
his  "Watchman";  and  when  he  and  Wordsworth  were 
living  near  each  other  in  Somersetshire  in  1797,  with- 
out any  ostensible  occupation  or  means  of  livelihood,  a 
spy  was  sent  to  watch  their  movements,  and  dog  them 
in  their  walks  on  the  Quantock  Hills.  This  worthy,  as 
might  have  been  expected,  could  make  little  of  any 
conversation  in  which  the  metaphysical  Coleridge  had 
the  lead  ;  but  one  day,  as  the  story  goes,  they  were 
talking  of  Spinoza,  and  as  the  spy  happened  to  have  a 

19  ** 


236  SCOTT 

very  red  nose,  and  laughter  sometimes  accompanied  the 
mention  of  Spinoza's  name,  he  thought  they  were 
poking  fun  at  him,  and  reported  accordingly.  Camp- 
bell, Ave  have  seen,  came  across  the  consequences  of  the 
French  Revolution  in  the  trial  of  Gerald  for  trying  to 
spread  revolutionary  principles  in  Scotland.  Moore  had 
personal  experience  of  other  consequences,  more  than 
one  of  his  college  friends  in  Dublin  being  concerned  in 
the  conspiracy  of  the  United  Irishmen,  a  direct  result 
of  the  establishment  of  the  Republic  in  France.  And 
Scott  also  felt  the  whiff  and  wind  of  the  world-shaking 
event,  though  in  a  different  way.  In  the  year  in  which 
Wordsworth  and  Coleridge  were  holding  their  memora- 
ble  conversations  on  the  Quantock  Hills  (in  1797), 
Scott,  a  young  Edinburgh  lawyer,  was  enrolled  as 
quartermaster  of  the  Royal  Mid-Lothian  Regiment  of 
Cavalry,  a  body  of  volunteers  raised  to  defend  the 
country  when  the  new  Republic  began  to  give  evidence 
of  an  aggressive  disposition.  At  the  very  time  when 
the  two  Lake  poets  were  discussing  the  principles  of 
ballad  composition,  and  carrying  them  out  each  in  his 
own  way,  Scott  was  galloping  on  the  sands  at  Mussel- 
burgh, also  intent  on  ballads,  chanting  fragments  of  old 
ballads  to  the  rhythm  of  his  horse's  motion,  and  making 
new  ballads  as  he  plunged  through  the  fresh  sea  air, 
and  re-enacting  in  imagination  the  feats  of  ancient 
chivalry. 

There  is  much  martial  spirit  in  Scott's  poetry,  and  it 
is  likely,  as  he  himself  believed,  that  his  battle-scenes 
owe  something  of  their  freshness  and  force  to  his  ex- 
perience in  the  saddle  of  the  Mid-Lothian  Yeomanry. 
When  a  glass  of  water  is  on  the  point  of  freezing,  a 
touch  with  a  wire  will  transform  it,  as  if  by  magic,  into 
a  bundle  of  icy  crystals  ;  and  it  is  possible  that  Scott 
wras  shaken  into  poetry  by  the  warlike  excitement  of 
galloping  about  directing  the  manoeuvres  of  his  volun- 
teers.    But  just  as  the  crystallization  of  the  freezing 


SOURCE    OF    MARTIAL    SPIRIT   IN    SCOTT's    POEMS       237 

water  is  determined  by  its  previous  condition,  so  was 
the  direction  of  Scott's  poetry  determined  before  he  had 
his  interest  in  chivalry  quickened  by  taking  part  in 
military  manoeuvres.  It  was  this  previous  poetic  educa- 
tion, in  fact,  that  made  him  take  such  a  keen  delight  in 
the  mimicry  of  war,  and  amidst  the  bustle  and  galloping 
to  and  fro  realize  how  the  ancient  knight  felt  when 
pricking  on  the  plain  in  search  of  adventures,  or  spur- 
ring his  horse  into  the  thick  of  a  battle. 

When  we  find  men  so  very  different  in  character 
and  circumstances  as  Coleridge,  and  Wordsworth,  and 
Scotsmen  reared  in  London,  in  Westmoreland,  in  Edin- 
burgh, all  simultaneously  interested  in  one  kind  of  com- 
position, we  may  be  sure  that  it  is  somehow  in  the 
air.  The  interest  in  ballad  literature  in  England  was 
first  made  acute  by  the  publication  of  Bishop  Percy's 
"  Reliques."  I  have  already  mentioned  the  date  of  this 
publication,  1765.  Such  things  are  the  great  events  of 
literary  history  ;  they  are  to  it  what  treaties  and  laws 
are  to  political  history  ;  and  their  dates  must  be  remem- 
bered if  we  are  to  understand  those  great  movements  of 
which  they  mark  the  beginnings.  Scott  first  got  hold 
of  this  collection  of  ballads  when  he  was  a  boy  of 
thirteen,  and  he  has  described  the  effect  produced  upon 
him.  "  The  summer  day,"  he  says,  "  sped  onward  so 
fast  that,  notwithstanding  the  sharp  appetite  of  thir- 
teen, I  forgot  the  hour  of  dinner,  was  sought  for  with 
anxiety,  and  was  still  found  entranced  in  my  intellectual 
banquet."  How  was  the  mental  soil  prepared  for  this 
enthusiastic  reception  ?  It  is  not  every  boy  of  thirteen 
that  can  become  so  absorbed  in  a  book  as  to  forget  his 
dinner.  Scott,  it  is  needless  to  say,  was  not  an  ordinary 
boy.  As  a  school-boy  he  was  not  brilliant  in  the  regular 
task-work.  He  seems  to  have  obstinately  refused  to 
learn  Greek,  and,  it  is  said,  was  nicknamed  by  an 
irritable  master  the  Greek  dunce  ;  and  his  position  in 
•the  Latin  class  is  described  by  himself  as  having  been 


238  SCOTT 

meteoric,  varying  rapidly  between  top  and  bottom.  It 
was  not,  indeed,  till  he  reached  the  higher  classes, 
where  the  master,  Dr.  Adams,  the  author  of  the  well- 
known  book  on  Roman  antiquities,  taught  something 
more  than  the  mere  syntax  of  the  language,  that  Scott 
ever  moved  far  from  the  less  honorable  position.  He 
rose  Avhen  questions  were  asked  outside  the  prescribed 
lessons,  and  fell  slowly  and  surely  when  the  course  of 
questioning  returned  to  the  grammar.  The  secret 
seems  to  have  been  that,  owing  to  bad  health,  he  had 
been  rather  irregularly  educated,  and  at  a  very  early 
age  had  formed  habits  of  reading  omnivorously  for  him- 
self, and  was  too  much  absorbed  in  his  own  reading  to 
have  much  interest  or  much  memory  to  spare  for  the 
niceties  of  Latin  construction.  About  the  time  when 
Percy's  ballads  fell  in  his  way,  he  was  confined  to  bed 
for  several  weeks  by  a  serious  illness,  and  one  of  the 
doctor's  prescriptions  for  him  was  that  he  should  be 
allowed  to  read  as  much  as  he  liked,  the  consequence 
being  that  he  read  through  the  greater  part  of  a  cir- 
culating library  in  the  neighborhood — novels,  romances, 
books  of  travel,  histories.  The  out-of-the-way  knowl- 
edge got  in  this  manner,  and  retained  in  a  memory  that 
was  always  singularly  powerful,  enabled  him  to  occa- 
sionally delight  the  antiquarian  rector  of  the  High 
School,  and  redeem  the  disgrace  incurred  by  the  inex- 
actness of  his  knowledge  of  the  classical  languages. 
The  future  novelist  was,  in  fact,  educating  himself, 
unconscioushy,  but  not  the  less  assiduously  and  effec- 
tively, for  his  work  in  life.  His  appetite  for  ballads 
had  been  specially  whetted  before  he  fell  to  at  Percy's 
"  Reliques "  with  such  eagerness.  His  ancestors  came 
from  the  great  ballad  country,  the  Borders  ;  and  some 
of  them  had  furnished  themes  for  the  ballad-singer. 
His  father  was  a  Writer  to  the  Signet  in  Edinburgh, 
and  his  mother  the  daughter  of  a  Professor  ;  but  he 
was  the  lineal  descendant  of  a  Border  chief,  "Wat  or- 


THE    CLAN    SCOTT  239 

Walter  Scott  of  Harden,  whose  wife  was  celebrated  in 
song  as  the  Flower  of  Yarrow.  She  was  the  lady  who, 
according  to  tradition,  was  in  the  habit  of  serving  up 
at  table,  when  provisions  ran  short,  a  dish  of  spurs — a 
signal  that  he  must  take  horse  and  borrow  a  few  cattle 
and  other  eatables  from  English  neighbors  on  the 
other  side  of  the  Border.  The  clan  Scott  occupied 
a  prominent  place  in  Border  history,  and  numbered  in 
its  various  ranks  not  a  few  heroes  of  the  persuasion  and 
callinor  of  Robin  Hood  and  Little  John."  One  of 
Scott's  earliest  and  favorite  books  was  a  history  of  this 
''right  honourable  clan,"  "gathered  out  of  ancient 
chronicles,  histories,  and  traditions  of  our  fathers," 
by  another  Walter  Scott,  Scott  of  Satchell,  "  an  old 
souldier,"as  he  described  himself,  "  and  no  scholler,  and 
one  that  can  write  names,  but  just  the  letters  of  his 
name."  The  delicate  boy's  imagination  had  been  fed 
on  Border  traditions,  and  one  of  the  first-fruits  of  his 
delight  with  Percy  was  a  resolution  to  collect  such 
ballads  as  were  to  be  found  in  circulation  among  the 
peasantry  of  his  own  country.  How  far  the  Latin  dunce 
was  from  being  a  dunce  at  work  within  the  range  of  his 
own  interests  may  be  judged  from  the  fact  that  at  the 
age  of  fifteen  he  wrote  a  poem,  which  he  modestly  com- 
mitted to  the  flames,  on  the  Conquest  of  Granada. 

After  leaving  the  High  School  Scott  attended  some 
classes  at  the  University,  but  what  they  were  is  of  no 
consequence.  He  went  on  educating  himself  widely 
and  energetically  in  his  own  way  and  on  his  own  lines, 
without  any  conscious  purpose.  In  1*786,  when  he  was 
fifteen  years  old, — he  was  just  one  year  younger  than 
Wordsworth, — he  abandoned  a  fancy  for  the  military 
profession,  and  was  entered  as  an  apprentice  in  his 
father's  office.  This  circumstance  was  important  in  his 
education  for  two  reasons.  It  trained  him  to  business 
habits,  for  which  he  was  remarkable  throughout  the 
whole  of  his  busy  life.     He  never  neglected  his  own 


240  SCOTT 

profession,  though  an  early  appointment  to  moderately 
lucrative  posts  withdrew  him  from  practice  at  the  bar  ; 
and  he  carried  habits  of  regularity,  method,  and  punctu- 
ality into  his  literary  work.  His  immense  power  of 
memory,  which  enabled  him  to  perform  such  wonders  of 
rapid  production  in  middle  age,  was  greatly  helped  by 
systematic  ways  of  storing  his  promiscuously  acquired 
antiquarian  and  historical  lore — his  arrangement  of 
books,  note-books,  and  references  being  always  a  model 
of  precision.  His  employment  in  his  father's  office  was 
of  important  service  to  him  in  another  way.  The  col- 
lection of  rents  and  other  legal  business  took  him  into 
various  parts  of  the  country,  and  gave  him  opportunities 
not  only  of  collecting  ballads,  which  he  did  deliberately 
and  of  set  purpose,  but  of  observing  and  studying,  which 
he  did  unconsciously,  the  oddities,  humors,  and  serious 
sentiments  of  that  society  of  which,  in  his  novels,  he 
afterward  drew  so  broad  and  truthful  a  picture. 

Another  cardinal  circumstance  in  his  education 
requires  to  be  mentioned.  It  was  a  small  circumstance 
in  itself,  but  it  had  considerable  consequences.  A  lect- 
ure on  German  Literature,  delivered  to  the  Edinburgh 
Philosophical  Society  by  Henry  Mackenzie,  the  "Man 
of  Feeling,"  in  1788,  seems  to  liave  roused  a  great  enthu- 
siasm for  the  study  of  German  among  the  young  men  of 
Edinburgh.  Scott,  then  a  youth  of  seventeen,  joined 
with  some  others  in  forming  a  class.  According:  to  his 
own  account,  he  was  told  by  their  teacher  that  he  would 
never  learn  the  language,  because  he  would  not  take 
pains  to  lay  a  stable  foundation  by  means  of  grammati- 
cal exercises  ;  but  he  learned  enoueh  to  be  able  to  sret 
at  the  meaning,  and  his  first  publications  were  transla- 
tions from  Burger  and  Goethe  in  1796  and  1799,  a  few 
romantic  ballads,  and  a  chivalry  play.  "  How  far," 
Carlyle  says,  "  '  Goetz  von  Berlichingen  '  actually  affected 
Scott's  literary  destination,  and  whether  without  it  the 
rhymed  romances,  and  then  the  prose  romances  of  the 


INFLUENCE    OF    GERMAN    LITERATURE  241 

Author  of '  Waverley,'  would  not  have  followed  as  they 
did,  must  remain  a  veryyobscure  question — obscure  and 
not  important."  Carlyle  probably  rather  suggests  the 
German  influence  on  Scott  when  he  speaks  of  Goetz  as 
the  parent  of  an  innumerable  progeny  of  "  chivalry 
pla}7s,  feudal  delineations,  and  poetico-antiquarian  per- 
formances." What  it  probably  did  for  him  was  to 
encourage  him  to  persevere  in  the  road  along  which  he 
was  already  travelling.  Before  coming  in  contact  with 
the  modern  ballads  and  feudal  tales  of  Germany  he  had 
exhausted  every  thing  of  the  kind  to  be  found  in  our 
own  literature,  and  had  even  mastered  old  French  and 
Italian  for  the  same  purpose,  reading  through  various 
collections  of  mediaeval  romances,  besides  Dante,  Boian'do,  J  «* 
and  Pulci,  and  "  fastening  like  a  tiger  upon  every  collec- 
tion of  old  songs  which  chance  threw  in  his  way."  Ger- 
man literature  attracted  him  as  the  first  attempt  in 
modern  Europe  to  found  a  new  literature  on  the  old — 
a  literature  inspired  b}r  an  antiquarian  spirit,  a  loving 
regard  for  old  times,  and  antagonistic  both  in  its  mysti- 
cal longings  and  in  its  literary  forms  to  the  clear,  precise 
vision  and  careful,  elaborate  style  of  the  school  of  Racine 
and  Pope.  Scott  himself  is  reported  to  have  said  of 
Taylor's  translation  of  "  Leonore "  :  "  This  was  what 
made  me  a  poet."  He  had  heard  Dugald  Stewart  recite 
the  lines  : 

"  Tramp,  tramp,  across  the  land  we  go  ; 
Splash,  splash  !  across  the  sea." 

"  I  had  several  times,"  he  said,  "  attempted  the  more 
regular  kind  of  poetry  without  success  ;  but  here  was 
something  that  I  thought  I  could  do."  This  was  when 
he  was  a  boy,  and  as  soon  as  he  knew  German  one  of 
his  first  tasks  was  a  translation  of  this  ballad  under  the 
title  of  "  William  and  Helen."  Now,  although  Scott 
made  the  remark  about  the  influence  of  Taylor's  trans- 
lation to  a  friend  of  Taylor's, — and  he  was  a  man  who 


242  SCOTT 

liked  to  say  complimentary  things  at  his  own  expense, — 
it  is  possible  that  the  fresh  German  literature  gave  him 
the  first  revelation  of  the  natural  bent  of  his  powers. 
But  the  impulse  he  received  from  German  literature 
would  probably  have  died  out  if  it  had  not  been  re-en- 
forced from  other  quarters.  As  Carlyle  says,  a  question 
of  the  kind  is  necessarily  obscure,  and  not  important; 
only  Scott's  contact  with  German  literature  deserves  to 
be  mentioned  as  an  incident  in  the  story  of  his  literary 
development. 

At  the  time  when  he  published  his  translations  from 
the  German,  although  he  had  reached  his  twenty-eighth 
year,  nobody  seems  to  have  had  a  suspicion  of  the  genius 
that  was  latent  in  him,  or  of  the  direction  that  it  would 
take.  To  the  outside  world  he  appeared  simply  as  a 
young  lawyer  likely  to  prosper  in  his  profession,  univer- 
sally popular  as  a  humorous  boon  companion,  always  in 
high  spirits,  rather  affecting  idleness,  yet  never  behind- 
hand with  his  work,  with  a  certain  reputation  as  a  man 
of  wide  reading,  taking  an  interest  in  literature  and 
antiquities,  but  not  suspected  of  any  serious  literary 
ambition.  A  casual  stranger  meeting  Scott  at  this  time, 
and  hearing  of  him  from  his  companions,  would  never 
have  dreamed  of  regarding  him  as  likely  to  become  a 
more  popular  poet  than  Wordsworth,  or  Coleridge,  or 
Campbell,  or  Moore.  None  of  these  young  men  thought 
of  disguising  their  literary  aspirations  ;  they  stood  from 
the  first  in  all  men's  eyes  upon  their  character  as  poets. 
Yet  somehow,  with  all  his  real  or  assumed  indifference, 
Scott  even  then  seems  to  have  received  rather  more 
than  the  respect  paid  to  the  mere  dilettcmte.  When 
Campbell  was  negotiating  the  publication  of  his  "Pleas- 
ures of  Hope,"  he  was  somehow  attracted  to  Scott,  and 
in  a  letter  that  has  been  preserved  showed  himself 
eminently  pleased  with  the  attention  that  Scott  paid  to 
him.  It  is  the  custom  to  speak  of  Scott  as  having 
stumbled,  by  accident,  as  it  were,  into  literary  fame  ; 


scott's  great  industry  243 

but  there  are  not  wanting  evidences  that,  although  he 
did  not  allow  literary  ambition  to  absorb  his  energies, 
and  kept  this,  like  all  other  aspirations,  under  the  con- 
trol of  a  healthy  practical  will,  he  was  not  quite  so  indif- 
ferent as  he  appeared.  He  was  not  a  man  who  wore  his 
heart  upon  his  sleeve,  and  he  liked  to  turn  aside  jestingly 
any  inquisition  into  his  own  serious  feelings.  In  his 
farewell  to  the  Harp  of  the  North  these  lines  occur  : 

"  Much  have  I  owed  thy  strains  on  life's  long  way, 
Through  secret  woes  the  world  has  never  known, 
When  on  the  weary  night  dawned  wearier  day, 
And  bitterer  was  the  grief  devour'd  alone. 

That  I  o'erlived  such  woes,  Enchantress  !  is  thine  own." 

After  they  were  published,  when  the  conversation  be- 
tween him  and  a  friend  turned  upon  them,  he  dis- 
missed the  subject  with  a  comical  look  and  smile, 
remarking  :  "  Yes,  as  Master  Stephen  says,  they  are  very 
melancholy  and  gentlemanlike."  In  like  manner,  he 
made  light  of  his  literary  studies,  and  affected  the  air 
of  a  trifling  outsider,  while  in  his  large  and  genial 
being  he  found  room  for  an  amount  of  literary  labor, 
and  steady  preparation  for  labor,  as  great  as  was  prac- 
tised by  any  professional  man  of  letters  in  his  time. 
"  Every  step  that  I  have  gained  in  the  world,"  he  once 
said,  "  has  been  hard  won  ";  and  it  is  a  mistake  to  look 
upon  Scott  as  a  careless,  good-humored  genius,  who 
stepped  into  the  lists  and  carried  off  the  prize  for  which 
so  many  other  men  had  been  laboriously  contending. 

From  a  very  early  age  the  ambition  to  "  found  a 
poetical  character,"  as  he  himself  expressed  it,  had  been 
a  powerful  motive  in  his  life,  though  not  overpowering 
and  all-absorbing  ;  and  he  had  been  steadily  accumulat- 
ing the  materials  of  which  he  made  such  rapid  use  when, 
at  last,  the  accident  he  had  been  waiting  for  pointed 
a  finger  in  the  right  direction.  He  possessed  his  soul  in 
patience,  and,  without  hasting  or  resting,  with  tranquil 


244  scott 

industry  accumulated  till  the  opportunity  declared  itself. 
Even  when  he  was  in  the  thick  of  his  novel- writing,  and 
producing  more  work  than  any  other  man  of  letters  in 
his  time, — two  or  three  novels  a  year, — he  was  apparently 
so  much    occupied  with    professional,  and    social,    and 
other  literary  engagements  that  James  Ballantyne,  who 
was  in  the  secret,  could  afford  to  treat  as  absurd  the 
idea  that   he   could    be   the   mysterious  author  of  the 
Waverley  novels.     How  could  a  man  who  had  to  be  in 
his  place  every  day  during  business  hours  as  Clerk  to  the 
Court  of  Session,  who  was  to  be  met  at  parties  in  the 
evening  when  he  lived  in  town,  who  had  his  house  full 
of  visitors  when  he  lived  in  the  country,  who  did  so 
much  miscellaneous  literary  work  in  his  own  name — how 
could  such  a  man  possibly  find  time  to  write  novels  that 
were  one  of  the  wonders  of  the  world.     The  reserve  that 
he  maintained  about  his  novels  with  such  plausibility, 
he  maintained  equally  well  in  his  earlier  days  when  he 
was  gathering  the  materials   that  he  afterward  wove 
into  shape.     "  Waverley,"  the  first  of  the  long  series  of 
his  novels,  was  not  published  till  1814,  but  he  did  not 
then  for  the  first  time  conceive  the  idea  of  realizing  the 
daily  life  of  people  in  the  old  times.     A  dozen   years 
before  that  some  remarks  that  he  made  in  a  talk  with 
Mr.  Gillies,  whose  "  Recollections  of  Sir  Walter  Scott " 
is  one  of  the  most  instructive  books  that  have  been 
written  about  the  great  man,  show  that  his  imagination 
was  then    busy  picturing   the    details   of   ancient  life. 
They  were  looking  at  the  ruins  of  Roslin  Castle,  and 
speaking  of  the  traditions  of  the  place,  when  Scott  said  : 
"  I  wish  we  knew  more  than  we  are  ever  likely  to  do  of 
the  powerful  family  that  once  owned  this  castle  and 
chapel.     Doubtless  there  were  beautiful  damsels  as  well 
as  belted  knights  that  now  '  sleep  the  sleep  that  knows 
no  waking '  under  these  cold  stones.     Anxious,  of  course, 
were  the  days  and  hours  which  they  spent  within  their 
castle  walls  ;  intricate  and  hazardous;  the  adventures  in 


CARLYLE    ON   RAPID    WRITING  245 

which  they  were  engaged.  A  chronicle  of  Roslin  or  of 
any  other  old  castle  of  consideration, — that  is  to  say,  a 
minute  record  of  the  lives  of  its  various  inhabitants,  how 
they  fought  and  caroused,  loved  and  hated,  worked  and 
played, — would  be  worth  more  than  all  the  mere 
romances  that  ever  were  penned,  as  a  fund  of  amusement 
and  instruction.  But  we  have  only  vague  outlines  ;  im- 
agination must  do  the  rest."  And  he  went  on  to  say  : 
"  On  the  whole,  how  little  more  do  we  learn  from  history 
than  that  Sir  William  lived  and  ruled  at  one  time,  and 
Sir  John  at  another,  while  of  the  fair  dames  little  or, 
nothing  is  said  !  We  find  their  names  in  long  lists,  it 
is  true,  and  as  having  assisted  in  certain  public  occasions 
of  war  or  pageantry.  But  the  poet  must  either  discover 
or  invent  more  than  this.  He  requires  to  know  their 
individual  habits  of  life,  their  wants,  wishes,  and  springs 
of  action.  In  truth,  we  know  far  more  about  Major 
Weir  and  his  enchanted  staff  than  about  any  of  the 
Roslin  barons  and  baronesses  ;  and  if  I  were  ever  to 
become  a  writer  of  prose  romances,  I  think  I  would 
choose  him,  if  not  for  my  hero,  at  least  for  an  agent  and 
leading  one  in  my  production." 

Carlyle  overlooked  such  evidences  of  the  zeal  with 
Avhich  Scott  in  his  younger  days  kept  his  imagination 
busy  in  reconstructing  past  life,  and  the  thoroughness 
with  which  he  ransacked  history  for  facts  to  guide  his 
imagination,  when  he  sneered  in  his  own  contemptuous 
way  at  Scott's  power  of  extempore  writing,  of  produc- 
ing "  impromptu  novels  to  buy  farms  with."  "  A  word 
here,"  Carlyle  says, "  as  to  the  extempore  style  of  writing, 
which  is  getting  much  celebrated  in  these  days.  Scott 
seems  to  have  been  a  high  proficient  in  it.  His  rapidity 
was  extreme  ;  and  the  matter  produced  was  excellent, 
considering  that  :  the  circumstances  under  which  some 
of  his  novels,  when  he  could  not  himself  write,  were 
dictated,  are  justly  considered  wonderful."  But  he 
goes  on  to  say,  "  in  the  way  of  writing,  no  great  thing 


246  SCOTT 

was  ever,  or  will  ever  be  done  with  ease,  but  with  diffi- 
culty. Let  ready  writers  with  any  faculty  in  them  lay 
this  to  heart.  Is  it  with  ease,  or  not  with  ease,  that  a 
man  shall  do  his  best,  in  any  shape  ;  above  all,  in  this 
shape  justly  named  of  '  soul's  travail,'  working  in  the 
deep  places  of  thought,  embodying  the  True  out  of  the 
Obscure  and  Possible,  environed  on  all  sides  with  the 
uncreated  False  ?  Not  so,  now  or  at  any  time.  The 
experience  of  all  men  belies  it;  the  nature  of  things 
contradicts  it.  Virgil  and  Tacitus,  were  they  ready 
writers?  The  whole  Prophecies  of  Isaiah  are  not 
equal  in  extent  to  this  cobweb  of  a  Hevieio  article. 
Shakespeare,  we  may  fancy,  wrote  with  rapidity,  but  not 
till  he  had  thought  with  intensity;  long  and  sore  had 
this  man  thought,  as  the  seeing  eye  may  discern  well, 
and  had  dwelt  and  wrestled  amid  dark  pains  and 
throes— though  his  great  soul  is  silent  about  all  that. 
It  was  for  him  to  write  rapidly  at  fit  intervals,  being 
ready  to  do  it.  And  herein  truly  lies  the  secret  of  the 
matter  :  such  surprises  of  mere  waiting,  after  due  energy 
of  preparation,  is  doubtless  the  right  method  ;  the  hot 
furnace  having  long  worked  and  simmered,  let  the  pure 
gold  flow  out  at  one  gush.  It  was  Shakespeare's  plan  ; 
no  easy  writer  he,  or  he  had  never  been  a  Shakespeare. 
Neither  was  Milton  one  of  the  mob  of  gentlemen  that 
write  with  ease." 

Sound  doctrine  this,  no  doubt,  and  particularly 
worthy  to  be  kept  in  remembrance  by  an  audience  like 
this,  who  will  exercise  a  paramount  daily  and  hourly 
influence  on  a  new  generation,  and  who  may  be  tempted 
to  encourage  boys  and  young  men  in  the  silly  conceit 
that  they  can  do  great  things  without  labor  and  by 
sheer  force  of  innate  capacity.  But  sound  as  Carlyle 
is  about  the  necessity  of  work,  he  is  most  unjust  in  his 
application  of  the  doctrine  to  the  case  of  Scott.  His 
savage  attack  on  Scott's  impromptu  manner  of  writing 
is  an  example  of  his  strange  inability,  with  all  his  pierc- 


carltle's  essay  ON  SCOTT  247 

ing  insight,  to  look  fairly  at  the  character  of  successful 
contemporaries.  Carlyle's  admirers  are  wont  now  to 
pass  over  all  criticisms  of  his  weak  points  with  the 
remark  that  it  is  the  fashion  now  to  run  him  down,  but 
as  I  published  twelve  years  ago  the  same  opinion  of 
him  that  I  hold  still,  I  may  claim  to  speak  without 
prejudice  from  recent  revelations.  His  essay  on  Scott, 
though  like  all  his  other  writings  the  work  of  a  man  of 
great  critical  genius,  is  throughout,  whenever  he  refers 
to  the  main  subject  of  it,  prejudiced  and  unfair.  Scott's 
novels  were  not  impromptu,  though  written  with  unpar- 
alleled rapidity  ;  in  his  case  there  had  been  great, 
furious  energy  of  preparation,  though  he  was  as  studi- 
ously secretive  about  the  preparation  as  he  was  about 
the  execution.  He  wrote  rapidly  because  he  wrote  out 
of  a  fully  stored  mind.  To  read  Carlyle's  essay  one 
would  suppose  that  Scott  turned  to  prose  romance  with 
careless  facility  when  he  found  that  his  metrical 
romances  no  longer  sold,  no  longer  commanded  the  ear 
of  the  public,  Byron  having  supplanted  him  in  popular 
favor.  This,  indeed,  is  a  very  common  impression, 
encouraged  by  a  sort  of  vulgar  wonder  at  Scott's  ver- 
satility, that  he  easily  turned  his  energies  to  prose  when 
he  found  that  verse  would  no  longer  pay.  But,  to  use 
Carlyle's  phrase,  "  the  seeing  eye  may  discern  well,"  if 
the  seeing  eye  takes  the  facts  of  Scott's  earlier  life 
within  the  range  of  its  vision  ;  that,  though  he  did  not 
begin  to  write  romances  in  prose  till  he  Avas  past  forty, 
a  large  part  of  his  previous  life,  so  wide-ranging  in  its 
energies,  had  been  a  most  studious  and  even  systematic 
preparation.  The  conversation  which  I  have  quoted  to 
you,  showing  a  bent  toward  pilose  romance  as  an  outlet 
for  the  creations  of  his  imagination,  took  place  some 
years  before  he  had  written  any  of  his  metrical  romances, 
and  while  he  was  still  only  known  among  his  personal 
acquaintances  as  a  moderately  prosperous  lawyer  and 
extremely   pleasant   companion.     In    fact,   viewing  his 


248  scott 

life  as  a  whole,  we  should  say  that  his  metrical  romances 
were  but  a  passing  diversion  from  the  main  direction  of 
his  imaginative  energies.  And  now  to  explain  briefly 
how  these  metrical  romances  came  to  be  written. 

The  "  Lay  of  the  Last  Minstrel "  was  the  first  of 
them.  He  was  engaged  in  preparing  for  the  press  his 
collection  of  Border  Minstrelsy,  the  fruits  of  his  search 
for  Border  ballads,  when  the  subject  and  the  form 
occurred  to  him.  He  was  possessed  at  the  time,  as  he 
tells  us,  with  the  ambition  of  "founding  a  poetical 
character,"  but  both  subject  and  form  were  suggested 
by  accident.  The  subject  grew  in  a  remote  way  out  of 
his  soldiering.  As  Quartermaster  of  the  Mid-Lothian 
Yeomanry,  Scott  made  the  acquaintance  of  the  Duke  of 
Buccleuch,  the  great  head  of  the  clan  Scott.  Feudal 
loyalty,  such  as  a  vassal  was  expected  in  mediaeval  times 
to  feel  for  his  lord,  was  a  real  sentiment  with  the  poet 
from  his  boyhood,  and  he  would  have  considered  it  a 
duty  to  look  upon  the  Duke  as  his  feudal  superior  with 
respect  and  reverence.  The  duty  was  rendered  a  pleas- 
ure by  the  character  of  the  man,  which  was  frank, 
hearty,  and  generous.  Something  as  near  an  intimacy 
as  possible  in  the  circumstances  sprang  up  between  the 
poet  and  the  Buccleuch  family.  The  young  Countess 
of  Dalkeith,  in  particular,  interested  herself  in  his 
amusement  and  business  of  ballad-collecting,  and  in  a 
few  original  ballads  which  he  had  composed  himself  for 
his  forthcoming  volume  and  for  other  collections.  One 
day  this  lady  suggested  to  Scott  what  she  considered 
an  excellent  subject  for  a  ballad.  It  was  a  legend  which 
she  had  heard  of  as  being  current  among  the  Border 
peasantry  concerning  one  Gilpin  Horner — a  strange, 
tricksy  hobgoblin,  which  used  to  turn  up  unexpectedly 
in  the  haunts  of  men  in  the  shape  of  an  ugly  little 
dwarf,  and  when  excited  was  in  the  habit  of  muttering  : 
"  Tint !  Tint  !  Tint."  One  sometimes  hears  the  ques- 
tion asked  why  the  goblin  page  in  the  "  Lay  of  the  Last 


ORIGIN  OF  THE  "  LAY  OF  TlIE  LAST  MINSTREL  "       249 

Minstrel"  cries  :  "  Lost !  Lost !  Lost !  "  What  or  who 
was  lost  ?  The  goblin  himself  it  is  that  is  lost,  having 
strayed,  as  it  were,  from  his  supernatural  master  into 
human  society  ;  wandering  off  in  a  truant,  frolicsome 
mood,  and  being  unable  to  find  his  way  back.  It  is  a 
pretty  fancy,  and  Scott  was  delighted  with  it  as  a  sub- 
ject, as  well  as  with  the  compliment  of  a  suggestion 
from  such  a  quarter.  This  was  exactly  what  it  ought 
to  be,  so  like  the  good  old  times,  when  the  gratified 
bard  received  a  theme  from  his  feudal  lady.  He  bowed 
at  once  to  the  high  command,  and  set  to  work  to  com- 
pose a  ballad  which  might  find  a  place  in  his  proposed 
Border  Minstrelsy.  It  was  natural  that  he  should  think 
of  connecting  the  goblin  somehow  with  the  house  of 
Scott,  considering  who  had  given  him  the  subject  ;  and 
it  was  natural  also  that,  thinking  of  this  noble  house  in 
connection  with  such  a  subject,  his  thoughts  should  turn 
to  a  renowned  lady  of  Buccleuch  in  the  sixteenth  cen- 
tury— Dame  Janet  Bethune,  a  woman  of  a  learned 
family,  with  a  reputation  for  her  knowledge  of  magic, 
as  well  as  for  the  vigor  with  which  she  had  managed 
the  affairs  of  her  house  during  a  long  widowhood. 
In  Scott's  active  imagination  the  subject  quickly 
took  such  dimensions  that  he  began  to  feel  that 
here  at  last  he  had  lighted  on  a  theme  for  a  work  of 
greater  pretensions  than  a  ballad — a  theme  out  of 
which  might  be  developed  a  picture  of  Border  manners 
such  as  he  had  long  been  ambitious  of  executing.  His 
ambition  for  some  time  had  soared  higher  than  the  bal- 
lad ;  he  had  become  convinced  that  a  poetical  character, 
such  as  he  wished  to  establish,  could  not  be  founded  on 
so  narrow  a  basis.  Once  inspired  with  the  thought  that 
his  opportunity  had  come  at  last,  he  quickly  elaborated  a 
simple  plot  on  which  to  weave  his  picture  of  life  on  the 
Borders  in  the  sixteenth  century,  of  alert  strongholds, 
fighting  clans,  gallant  chieftains,  sturdy  and  fearless 
retainers — elevating  it  into  the  regions  of  romance  with 


250  SCOTT 

a  deal  of  love  and  superstition.  It  is  difficult  for  us  to 
realize  what  an  influence  Scott  had  in  changing  the  cur- 
rent conception  of  the  Borderers.  They  had  long  been 
looked  upon  as  simply  cattle-stealers,  and  yet  Scott,  by 
the  force  of  his  genius,  convinced  people  that  his  way 
of  looking  on  them  was  the  right  way. 

From  the  time  of  Jeffrey  till  the  "Life  of  Scott"  in 
the  English  Men  of  Letters  Series  it  has  been  the 
custom  to  say  that  the  plot  machinery  in  the  "  Lay  of 
the  Last  Minstrel "  is  defective,  and  that  the  goblin  is  a 
mere  excrescence.  It  is  argued  that  Scott  failed  to  con- 
nect the  superstitious  machinery  with  the  general  course 
of  the  story,  and  that  every  thing  done  by  the  goblin's 
action  might  have  been  accomplished  by  natural  means. 
That  was  the  common  criticism  in  Scott's  time,  and 
when  it  was  mentioned  to  him,  he  characteristically  made 
a  jest  of  it.  He  said  he  had  meant  him  for  a  great  per- 
sonage, but  he  had  slunk  down  to  the  kitchen.  This 
criticism  was  made  under  the  false  idea  that  Scott  com- 
posed carelessly  and  in  haste.  The  truth  is  that  the 
goblin  at  every  turn  of  the  story  has  an  influence  on  the 
action.  Of  course  it  is  true  enough  that  different  means 
might  have  been  adopted,  but  then  the  effect  would 
have  been  different. 

Jeffrey  said  that  the  young  laird  might  have  wan- 
dered into  the  wood  by  himself,  but  the  effect  produced 
on  us  by  the  goblin  enticing  him  out  in  a  wicked  frolic 
and  eluding  the  sentinels  by  an  assumed  disguise  is  very 
different.  The  plot  is  more  complex  than  this,  and, 
indeed,  is  more  compactly  framed  than  is  generally 
stated  in  formal  criticisms  of  the  work.  The  story 
opens  with  a  feast  in  Branksome  Hall,  where  the  knights 
are  in  readiness  to  depart.  While  they  are  making 
merry,  the  Lady  retires  to  her  bower,  and  overhears  the 
spirits  of  the  mountain  and  of  the  flood  conversing 
about  her  daughter's  fate.  She  hears  them  say  that 
Branksome  will  never  prosper  till  the  Lady's  pride  be 


THE    GOBLIN'S    PART    IN    THE    PLOT  251 

quelled  and  her  daughter  allowed  to  marry  Lord  Cran- 
stoun,  with  wliose  family  they  are  at  feud.  The  Lady 
determines  to  defy  fate,  and  sends  William  of  Deloraine 
to  Melrose  Abbey  for  a  mystical  book  that  has  long 
been  buried  in  the  tomb  of  "  the  wondrous  Michael 
Scott."  On  returning  with  his  treasure  William  is 
attacked  and  wounded  by  Cranstoun  and  left  to  the  care 
of  the  Earl's  goblin  page.  The  goblin  sees  the  mystic 
book  and  sits  down  to  unclasp  it,  but  has  scarcely  done 
so  when  thunder  is  heard  and  a  flash  of  lightning  comes 
between  him  and  the  book — not,  however,  till  the  sprite 
has  mastered  certain  magic  spells. 

By  means  of  his  newly  acquired  knowledge  the 
goblin  conveys  Deloraine  into  the  castle  and  decoys  the 
young  heir  into  the  woods,  where  the  boy  is  caught  by 
the  English.  Deloraine  had  committed  some  outrage 
on  the  English  Border,  and  Percy  had  entered  Scotland 
to  demand  his  surrender.  The  Lady  will  not  give  him 
up,  but  says  that  he  will  appear  himself  to  fight  the 
man  who  has  brought  the  charge  against  him.  But  how 
can  William  do  this,  since  he  is  seriously  wounded? 
Here  comes  the  important  action  of  the  goblin.  He 
uses  the  spell  to  bring  Cranstoun  into  Branksome,  and 
Cranstoun,  dressed  in  Deloraine's  armor,  proves  victori- 
ous. The  Lady  then  admits  that  fate  is  too  strong  for 
her,  and  allows  him  to  marry  her  daughter.  Thus  the 
action  of  the  goblin  page  is  a  very  essential  one,  and 
Scott  had  a  deeper  meaning  in  the  story  than  appears 
on  the  surface.  He  further  imitated  mediaeval  stories 
in  making  the  "  Lay  "  a  sort  of  allegory,  in  which  the 
struggle  between  supernatural  and  human  powers  por- 
trays the  struggle  between  human  will  and  fate.  The 
means  that  the  Lady  takes  to  prevent  what  is  destined 
from  coming  to  pass  become  in  the  end  the  very  means 
by  W'hich  it  happens. 

As  to  the  metre  of  the  story,  it  is  interesting  to  know 
that  Scott  received  an  important  hint  from  Coleridge's 


252  SCOTT 

"  Christabel."  We  find  the  influence  of  Coleridge 
appearing  everywhere  in  the  early  part  of  the  nine- 
teenth century,  despite  the  fact  that  he  wrote  so  little. 
"Christabel"  was  composed  in  179V,  although  it  was 
not  published  till  1816,  and  it  so  happened  that  a  friend 
at  Malta  to  whom  he  recited  the  poem  had  such  a 
remarkable  memory  that  he  was  able  afterward  to  recite 
it  in  turn  to  Scott.  It  was  thus  that  Scott  got  the  hint 
of  a  peculiar  variety  of  the  metre  he  used. 


CHAPTER  XVII 

BYRON 

SUMMARY  OF  LIFE — POPULAR  IDENTIFICATION  OF  THE  POET  WITH 
HIS  CREATIONS — "ENGLISH  BARDS  AND  SCOTCH  REVIEWERS" 

The  year  of  the  publication  of  "  Chikle  Harold," — the 
work  that  brought  Byron's  extraordinary  personality 
before  the  world, — was  1812.  The  day  even  is  worth 
remembering,  because  it  had  probably  been  chosen 
with  a  superstitious  preference  and  a  fancy  for  singu- 
larity in  the  smallest  things  characteristic  of  the  man. 
It  was  the  29th  of  February,  a  date  in  the  calendar  that 
comes  only  once  in  four  years. 

Like  Scott,  Byron  leaped  at  once  into  fame.  While 
Wordsworth  and  Coleridge  and  Southey  and  Campbell 
and  Moore  were  known  only  to  small  circles  and  isolated 
admirers,  the  fame  of  Scott  and  Byron  was  European. 
"  The  Lay  of  the  Last  Minstrel "  was  sold  and  read 
more  widely  than  any  poem  ever  had  been  before.  It 
was  followed  by  "  Marmion  "  and  "  The  Lady  of  the 
Lake,"  and  the  applause  grew  louder  and  more  general 
with  each  publication.  "  The  Vision  of  Don  Roderick," 
a  slighter  poem  and  in  a  different  stanza,  was  received 
somewhat  more  coldly;  but  when  "  Childe  Harold  "  was 
published,  Scott  was  engaged  on  another  metrical 
romance,  "  Rokeby,"  for  which  he  received  a  larger 
price  than  had  ever  before  been  paid  for  a  poem — a 
sign  that,  in  the  opinion  of  publishers  at  least,  his  popu- 
larity was  still  on  the  increase.  Then  Byron's  turn 
came.  "Childe  Harold"  was  received  with  an  intense 
excitement  beside  which  the  rage  for  Scott's  poetry 
appeared  insignificant.  Scott  to  this  extent  had  pre- 
pared the  way  for  Byron,  that  he  had  given  an  interest 

253 


254  BYE ON 

in  poetry  to  thousands  of  readers  to  whom  verse  in  any 
shape  had  been  a  thing  to  be  avoided  as  dull  and  unin- 
telligible. But  no  poet  before  Byron  had  commanded 
so  wide  an  audience;  the  world  had  never  seen  so 
general  a  curiosity  about  a  poet's  next  work. 

Writers  about  Byron,  from  Moore  to  Mrs.  Oliphant, 
have  puzzled  themselves  to  account  for  the  instantane- 
ousness  with  which  "Childe  Harold"  took  hold  of  the 
public  mind,  and  have  generally  found  the  solution  in 
the  fascinating  strangeness  and  romantic  interest  of  the 
writer's  character.  This  was  part  of  the  secret,  no 
doubt  a  large  part ;  but  it  was  not  all.  If  each  gener- 
ation were  not  so  busy  with  the  moods  of  the  moment  as 
to  be  incajsable  without  an  effort  of  realizing  how  people 
felt  in  the  peculiar  situations  of  past  history,  the  fit- 
ness of  Byron's  first  great  work  to  the  time  in  which  it 
was  produced  could  hardly  have  escaped  observation. 
When  we  turn  to  "  Childe  Harold  "  now,  our  interest  is 
all  in  the  poet,  and  we  skip  with  comparative  indiffer- 
ence the  stanza  after  stanza  of  description  and  reflection 
to  fasten  on  the  autobiographical  portions.  But  in  the 
stanzas  that  we  now  skip  the  readers  of  the  writer  of 
1812  found  powerful  expression  given  to  thoughts  that 
were  agitating  their  own  minds,  concerning  scenes  and 
events  that  had  for  them  an  intensity  of  interest  such 
as  men  rarely  feel  except  about  their  own  personal  con- 
cerns. Bear  in  mind  the  position  of  England  and  the 
state  of  Europe  at  the  time,  read  the  first  two  cantos  of 
"  Childe  Harold  "  in  that  connection,  and  you  will  find  in 
stanza  after  stanza  abundant  evidence  of  one  cause  for 
the  excitement  with  which  the  poem  was  received. 
Napoleon  Avas  then  at  the  zenith  of  his  career,  master  of 
Germany  and  Austria  and  Italy,  and  half  master  of 
Spain.  It  seemed  as  if  he  was  on  the  point  of  achieving 
his  ambition  of  making  the  conquest  of  Europe.  He 
was  engaged  in  preparing  for  that  huge  expedition  into 
Russia  which  proved  his  ruin,  but  there  was  no  symptom 


EXCITEMENT   THROUGHOUT   THE    COUNTRY  255 

of  ruin  then.  His  arms  had  hardly  received  a  check, 
except  from  English  troops  in  the  Peninsula.  Great 
Britain  seemed  the  only  power  capable  of  checking  his 
course,  and  there  was  an  intensity  of  excitement 
throughout  our  country  such  as  had  never  been  experi- 
enced before  and  has  never  been  since.  We  were  fight- 
ing for  our  national  existence,  fighting  as  the  champions 
and  leaders  of  all  the  kingdoms  of  Christendom,  pour- 
ing subsidies  into  the  hands  of  our  Continental  allies, 
raising  armies  by  conscription.  All  eyes  were  turned 
at  the  moment  upon  Spain,  where  our  troops  under 
Wellington,  after  some  doubtful  victories,  stood  at  bay 
within  the  lines  of  Torres  Vedras,  facing  four  French 
armies  that  were  quartered  in  the  Peninsula. 

In  the  midst  of  this  excitement  what  were  our  poets 
doing  to  put  themselves  in  sympathy  with  the  national 
mood?  Every  one  of  them  was  quietly  pursuing  his 
own  predetermined  line  of  literary  activity,  inspired  by 
no  message  to  the  troubled  spirit  of  the  age  of  force 
and  distinction  enough  to  command  attention.  Words- 
worth had,  indeed,  issued  from  his  Westmoreland  retreat 
a  commonplace  prose  tract  on  the  Convention  of  Cintra, 
and  some  noble  sonnets  dedicated  to  Liberty  and  Inde- 
pendence. Some  of  these  sonnets  are  among  his  master- 
pieces in  point  of  literary  form  and  loftiness  of  senti- 
ment ;  but  they  have  not  the  fire  and  directness  of 
popular  verse.  Coleridge,  his  brief  fit  of  poetic  activity 
over,  was  lecturing  on  Shakespeare,  and  expounding 
political  philosophy  in  a  periodical  called  the  Friend. 
Southey  was  writing  review  articles  for  the  Quarterly, 
and  meditating  a  poem  on  the  last  of  the  Goths,  in 
execution  of  his  scheme  of  poems  based  on  national 
mythologies.  Moore  was  busy  with  a  new  number  of 
his  Irish  Melodies,  and  speculating  on  the  chances  of  a 
change  of  Government.  Campbell,  who  had  electrified 
the  country  twelve  years  earlier  with  his  national  songs, 
had   revived   the   Spenserian  stanza  in   "  Gertrude   of 


256  BYRON 

Wyoming,"  and  was  working  hard  at  task-work  for 
the  publishers.  Scott  had  shown  more  inclination 
to  follow  the  direction  of  popular  interest.  He  had 
appealed  to  the  spirits  of  the  Mountains  and  the  Tor- 
rents, who  had  inspired  his  minstrelsy  before,  to  vouch- 
safe him  insinuation  for  a  loftier  theme,  the  liberation 
of  the  Spaniards  by  Wellington  ;  and  in  "  The  Vision 
of  Don  Roderick  "  had  celebrated  the  triumphs  of  our 
soldiers  in  the  Peninsula  with  stirring  martial  ardor. 
There  was  much  spirit  in  the  strain,  and  three  of  the 
stanzas  describing  the  soldiers  of  England,  Scotland, 
and  Ireland  have  become  classical,  and  are  still  dear  to 
every  school-boy.  As  a  prophet  of  the  warlike  spirit  of 
the  time  Scott  was  unmatched  and  unmatchable,  but  he 
harped  only  on  one  string,  and  high  and  stubborn  as 
was  the  resolution  of  the  country  at  the  moment,  fixed 
as  it  was  in  its  determination  to  fight,  the  national  mind 
was  crossed  by  other  moods  in  the  pauses  of  the  con- 
flict, moods  to  which  the  equally  tempered  Scott  was 
incapable  of  giving  expression.  And  these  moods,  nat- 
ural in  a  time  of  great  excitement  and  sustained  sus- 
pense, found  an  exponent  of  titanic  force  in  the  young 
poet  who  made  his  voice  heard  in  the  pilgrimage  of 
"  Childe  Harold."  Can  it  be  matter  for  astonishment 
that  all  ears  were  inclined  to  hear  ? 

The  strain  in  which  the  new  poet  addressed  the  public 
was  not  the  most  obviously  opportune  one  of  drum  and 
trumpet  exhortation.  It  was  full  of  irregular,  almost 
capricious  changes,  varying  through  many  moods,  from 
fierce  delight  in  battle  and  fiery  enthusiam  for  freedom 
to  cynical  mockery  of  ambition  and  despondent  medita- 
tion on  the  fleeting  character  of  human  happiness  and 
national  greatness.  It  was  the  work  of  a  distempered 
mind,  and  it  spoke  out  with  passionate  sincerity  what 
was  in  that  mind  ;  and  so  doing,  as  the  age  itself  was 
moody  and  distempered  with  prolonged  and  feverish 
excitement,  it  was  a  revelation  to  thousands  of  readers 


« 


CHILDE    HAROLD"  257 


of  their  own  inmost  thoughts.  Macaulay  in  a  well-known 
passage  describes  Byron  as  having  interpreted  Words- 
worth to  the  multitude.  Looking  at  this — his  first  pro- 
duction— purely  from  the  literary  point  of  view,  there 
is  much  truth  in  this,  for  the  pilgrimage  of  "  Childe 
Harold  "  was  undoubtedly  the  spontaneous  overflow  of 
powerful  feeling  ;  the  poem  was  evolved  by  the  poet's 
imagination  out  of  genuine  personal  emotion  ;  the  satis- 
faction of  this  emotion  was  the  motive  that  set  the 
imagination  at  work.  Byron's  poetry  came  from  the 
heart.  In  this  respect,  and  also  in  the  matter  of  poetic 
diction,  he  may  truly  be  said  to  have  interpreted  Words- 
worth's theories  to  the  multitude.  But  he  did  more 
than  this  :  he  interpreted  the  multitude  to  themselves  ; 
he  showed  them  as  in  a  glass  what  they  had  been  on 
the  point  of  thinking. 

The  first  stage  of  Childe  Harold's  pilgrimage  lay 
through  Spain,  on  which  at  that  moment  the  trembling 
hopes  of  Europe  were  fixed  as  the  theatre  where 
Napoleon's  fate  was  to  be  determined — where  the  last 
stake  was  being  played  for  or  against  him.  The  poet 
described  the  scenery  where  this  thrilling  drama  was 
in  progress,  and  commented  on  the  actors  and  the 
incidents.  We  must  remember  this  to  understand  the 
full  force  for  his  contemporaries  of  such  lines  as : 

"  By  Heaven!  it  is  a  splendid  sight  to  see 
(For  one  who  hath  no  friend,  no  brother  there) 
Their  rival  scarfs  of  mix'd  embroidery, 
Their  various  arms  that  glitter  in  the  air." 

Or  : 

"  And  must  they  fall — the  young,  the  proud,  the  brave — 
To  swell  one  bloated  chief's  unwholesome  reign  ? 
No  step  between  submission  and  a  grave? 
The  rise  of  rapine  and  the  fall  of  Spain  ?  " 

Or: 

"  No  more  beneath  soft  Eve's  consenting  star 
Fandango  twirls  his  jocund  castanet : 


258  BYRON 

Ah  monarchs  !  could  ye  taste  the  mirth  ye  mar, 
Not  in  the  toils  of  glory  would  ye  fret  ; 
The  hoarse  dull  drum  would  sleep,  and  man  be  happy  yet!  " 

Or  the  stanza  with  which  he  takes  farewell  of  Spain  : 

"  Nor  yet,  alas  !  the  dreadful  work  is  done  ; 
Fresh  legions  pour  adown  the  Pyrenees  : 
It  deepens  still,  the  work  is  scarce  begun, 
Nor  mortal  eye  the  distant  end  foresees. 
Fall'n  nations  gaze  on  Spain  :  if  freed,  she  frees 
More  than  her  fell  Pizarros  once  enchained." 

In  the  second  canto  Byron  conducted  his  pilgrim  to 
Greece,  to  scenes  of  departed  greatness,  and  his  medi- 
tations there  also  struck  a  sympathetic  chord  in  the 
hearts  of  a  people  who  saw  historic  grandeurs  trembling 
all  round  them,  and  knew  not  when  the  turn  of  their 
own  empire  would  come.  The  half-hearted  mirth  with 
which  the  pilgrim,  with  his  assumption  of  joyless  cyni- 
cism and  discontent  produced  by  satiety,  relieved  the 
monotony  of  his  gloomy  meditations,  his  sudden  changes 
of  mood  from  ardent  aspiration  to  bitter  mockery,  from 
impassioned  delight  in  nature's  beauties  to  scorn  of 
men's  deformities,  were  all  in  unison  with  the  hysterical, 
distracted  state  of  the  public  temper.  We  must  live 
over  again  the  anxieties  of  those  troubled  years  when 
the  strain  of  resistance  to  Napoleon's  ambition,  sustained 
year  after  year,  was  becoming  intolerable,  and  the 
sternest  resolution  was  dashed  at  times  by  fears  that  the 
dreams  of  the  man  of  destiny  would  be  fulfilled — we 
must  do  this  to  understand  the  instantaneous  effect  of 
"  Childe  Harold."  The  poet  spoke  the  words  that  were 
on  every-body's  lips,  spoke  them  with  all  the  fire  and 
intensity  of  genius.  Intense  susceptibility  to  the  impres- 
sions of  the  moment  was  alwaj^s  a  striking  feature  of 
Byron's  character,  and  he  "  drew  from  his  audience  in  a 
vapor,"  to  use  once  more  Mr.  Gladstone's  famous  simile, 
"  what  he  gave  back  to  them  in  a  flood."     He  professed 


PUBLIC    INTERPRETATION    OF    THE    POEM  259 

indifference  in  the  opening  of  bis  poem  ;  spoke  with  a 
languid  air  of  bis  reluctance  to  awake  tbe  weary  Nine 
for  so  lowly  a  lay  as  bis  ;  but  tbe  fire  of  most  of  tbe 
subsequent  stanzas  gave  tbe  lie  to  tins  affectation. 

Tbis  close  harmony  with  the  moods  of  the  time  is 
greatly  left  out  of  sight  in  attempts  to  explain  the 
rapidity  with  which  Byron  gained  the  ear  of  his  audi- 
ence. Too  much  stress  is  laid  in  these  explanations  on 
the  romantic  character  of  the  hero,  driven  into  his 
pilgrimage  by  a  strange  unrest,  satiated  with  pleasure, 
rendered  joyless  by  the  excess  of  it,  prematurely  pene- 
trated by  the  conviction  that  all  is  vanity  ;  a  wanderer, 
not  because  he  hopes  for  relief  from  change,  but  because 
change  is  an  imperative  necessity  to  him.  It  was  not 
tbe  character  of  "  Childe  Harold  "  that  first  drew  atten- 
tion to  the  poem  ;  it  was  tbe  interest  in  the  poem  that 
drew  attention  to  the  character  of  the  poet,  with  whom 
the  public,  in  spite  of  bis  protests,  persisted  in  identify- 
ing him.  We  must  not  credit  the  readers  of  the  first 
two  cantos  of  "  Childe  Harold  "  with  knowing  all  that 
we  can  now  learn  about  Byron,  from  works  of  which 
this  first  effort,  with  all  its  revelation  of  power,  was 
comparatively  but  a  feeble  and  one-sided  instalment. 
Their  interest  was  principally  in  the  poem  itself,  which 
enthralled  them  before  they  knew  much  or  any  thing 
about  the  author  ;  and  if  we  try  to  look  at  it  with  their 
eyes,  following  its  movement  with  the  interest  they 
naturally  had  in  its  incidents,  we  find  abundant  reason 
for  their  admiration  in  the  impetuous  vehemence  with 
which  the  poet  hurries  from  theme  to  theme,  fixing  one 
impression  after  another  with  a  few  powerful  strokes, 
moving  with  the  ease  of  a  giant  in  the  fetters  of  a  diffi- 
cult stanza,  controlling  tbe  l^mes  with  a  master's 
hand  into  the  service  of  bis  fervent  feeling,  instead  of 
allowing  them  to  direct  and  check  and  hamper  its  flow 
as  is  the  way  with  rhymesters  of  less  resource.  The 
interest  of  the  public  once  kindled  in  tbe  poem,  turned 


260  BYRON 

naturally  to  the  poet,  and  they  would  have  it  that  in  his 
strange  hero,  a  new  character  in  poetry,  he  had  drawn 
the  picture  of  himself.  Every  striking  publication  sets 
the  public  speculating  about  the  author,  and  there  were 
several  superficial  circumstances  that  favored  this  belief. 
Byron  had  himself  passed  through  the  scenes  through 
which  he  conducted  his  pilgrim.  True,  he  said  in  the 
preface  that  the  pilgrim  was  only  "  a  fictitious  character 
introduced  for  the  sake  of  giving  some  connection  to 
the  piece"  ;  but  the  very  disclaimer  encouraged  the 
public  in  the  popular  conviction.  When  they  began 
enquiring  about  the  author,  they  found  that  he  was  a 
young  lord  in  his  twenty-fifth  year,  who  had  for  some 
time  been  his  own  master,  and  had  led  rather  a  dissolute 
life  ;  why,  if  he  did  not  mean  to  picture  himself,  should 
he  choose  so  discreditable  a  fictitious  character  as  a 
prematurely  jaded  voluptuary,  stalking  in  joyless  revery 
through  scenes  in  which  all  Europe  at  the  time  felt  a 
living  interest  ? 

The  mistake  was  natural,  perhaps,  and  yet  none  the 
less  it  was  a  mistake.  Childe  Harold's  moods  were 
only  the  darker  moods  of  an  intemperately  sensitive 
and  variable  spirit,  in  which  heights  of  joyous  mirth 
were  quite  as  frequent  as  depths  of  sombre  melancholy. 
When  Byron  began  the  poem,  his  intention  was,  as  he 
says  in  his  preface,  following  the  words  of  Dr.  Beattie, 
"  to  give  full  scope  to  his  inclination,  and  be  either 
droll  or  pathetic,  descriptive  or  sentimental,  tender  or 
satirical,  as  the  humor  struck  him."  He  had  intended, 
in  fact,  what  he  afterward  accomplished  in  "Don  Juan." 
And  in  his  first  draughts  of  the  poems  he  had  called  the 
hero  Childe  Burun,  the  ancient  name  of  his  family. 
But  as  he  went  on  and  thought  of  making  his  pilgrim 
a  fictitious  character  of  certain  stamp,  a  character,  as  he 
tells  us,  modelled  on  Dr.  Moore's  "  Zeluco,"  he  altered 
the  cast  of  the  poem  to  correspond,  and  replaced  more 
than  one  mirthful  passage  by  others  of  a  melancholy 


the  poet's  upbringing  261 

description.  Thus  only  one  side  of  his  own  character 
was  represented  in  the  poem,  and  the  shades  even  of 
that  were  very  much  deepened. 

To  make  this  clear  let  us  run  rapidly  over  his  life  be- 
fore the  publication  of  "  Childe  Harold."  We  shall  see 
that  he  had  other  reasons  for  despondency  and  discon- 
tent than  the  fulness  of  satiety.  His  life  had  been  very 
different  from  that  of  most  young  members  of  the  peer- 
age. He  had  succeeded  to  the  title  of  Lord  Byron  at 
the  age  of  ten  by  the  death  of  an  eccentric  and  violent 
grand-uncle,  who  had  never  recognized  his  existence  or 
done  any  thing  to  help  his  mother  in  giving  him  an  edu- 
cation suitable  to  his  future  rank.  The  Byrons  were 
one  of  the  oldest  families  in  England,  but  for  several 
generations  before  the  birth  of  the  poet  the  family 
estates  had  been  reduced  and  the  family  name  disgraced 
by  turbulent,  extravagant,  and  scandalous  conduct. 
There  were  honorable  traditions  in  the  family,  but  they 
belonged  to  a  date  before  its  elevation  to  the  peerage. 
Captain  Byron,  the  poet's  father,  was  a  profligate 
younger  son,  who  added  gaming  to  his  other  vices. 
His  first  wife  was  the  divorced  wife  of  a  peer,  with 
whom  he  had  eloped,  and  who  died  soon  after  their 
marriage.  The  Hon.  Mrs.  Leigh,  Byron's  half-sister, 
was  the  only  offspring  of  this  union.  His  second  wife 
was  Catherine  Gordon,  the  heiress  of  Gight.  He  mar- 
ried her  for  her  money,  and  in  less  than  two  years 
(1786-88)  it  was  swallowed  up  in  the  payment  of  his 
debts.  Gight  was  sold,  and  she  was  left  with  only 
enough  to  yield  her  the  small  pittance  on  which  she 
educated  her  son.  This  son,  the  poet,  was  born  in  Lon- 
don on  January  22,  1788.  Mrs.  Byron,  though  passion- 
ately attached  to  her  spendthrift  husband,  was  a  woman 
of  extremely  violent  temper  ;  and  life  with  her  hus- 
band proving  impossible,  she  withdrew  with  her  young 
son  to  Aberdeen  in  1790,  two  years  after  his  birth. 
The  father  contrived  to  extort  from  her  narrow  means 


262  BYEON 

a  sum  sufficient  to  take  him  to  France,  and  died  there  in 
the  following  year.  Mrs.  Byron  remained  in  Aberdeen, 
domiciled  in  one  flat  after  another  in  Queen  Street,  Vir- 
ginia Street,  and  Broad  Street,  till  the  death  of  the 
fourth  Lord  Byron  in  1*798,  in  the  poet's  eleventh  year, 
opened  the  way  to  his  succession,  and  the  family  re- 
moved South.  With  such  a  mother,  a  woman  of  natu- 
rally ungovernable  temper,  exasperated  by  her  being 
dragged  down  from  affluence  to  poverty,  sometimes 
fondling  her  child  with  extravagant  affection,  some- 
times storming  at  him  as  "  a  lame  brat,"  and  hurling 
things  at  him, — the  fire-irons  are  said  to  have  been  her 
favorite  weapons, — a  proud,  sensitive,  passionate  child 
was  not  likely  to  learn  self-control.  Among  other 
things,  she  probably  exaggerated  that  sensitiveness 
about  his  lameness  to  which  biographers  and  critics  at- 
tach so  much  importance.  He  seems  to  have  had  one 
or  both  feet  clubbed,  and  one  of  the  first  uses  that  his 
mother  made  of  her  larger  command  of  money,  when 
he  became  Lord  Byron,  was  to  consult  physicians  and 
quacks  about  the  cure  of  this  defect,  and  on  their  ad- 
vice to  apply  painful  remedies  in  vain.  Her  violent 
temper  and  capricious  affection  harmed  him  quite  as 
much  after  his  accession  as  before,  for  she  kept  inces- 
santly interfering  with  himself  and  his  teachers,  and 
quarrelled  so  outrageously  with  his  guardian,  Lord  Car- 
lisle, and  with  every-body  who  came  near  her,  that  she 
was  practically  excluded  from  the  society  of  people  of 
her  own  rank.  Thus  it  happened  that  when  Byron 
came  of  age  he  had  no  friends  except  such  as  he  had 
made  for  himself  at  Harrow  and  Cambridge.  Brought 
up  with  very  exalted  ideas  of  his  own  rank,  all  the 
more  vivid  that  he  had  not  been  born  in  it,  he  had  no 
knowledge  of  the  domestic  life  of  families  in  that 
rank;  he  had  no  social  acquaintance  with  them,  and 
when  he  was  of  age  to  take  his  seat  in  the  House  of 
Lords,  there  was   not  a  single  member  of  that  House 


HIS    VARIABLE    TEMPER  263 

whom  he  could  ask  as  a  personal  friend  to  introduce 
him.  There  was  some  technical  difficulty  also  about 
his  taking  his  seat.  At  the  last  moment  an  impediment 
was  discovered,  which  could  not  be  removed  till  a  docu- 
ment had  been  hunted  up  somewhere  in  Cornwall.  When 
Ityron  set  out  in  1809  on  the  travels  which  he  has  im- 
mortalized in  "Childe  Harold's  Pilgrimage,"  he  had  no 
pleasant  home  to  take  leave  of,  no  pleasant  relations  to 
break  off  with  the  class  to  which  he  belonged.  He  had 
bitter  memories  where  other  men  have  sweet  and  sad  ; 
and  in  his  despondent  moods  it  required  no  strong  effort 
of  imagination  to  picture  himself  as  a  joyless  outcast, 
a  scornful  hater  of  his  kind.  Perhaps  one  reason  for 
the  readiness  with  which  the  public  identified  him  with 
his  gloomy  hero  was  that  they  could  not  understand 
how  a  young  lord  could  be  unhappy  from  any  other 
cause  but  a  surfeit  of  the  pleasures  of  life  ;  they  did 
not  know  at  what  a  distance  from  the  lap  of  luxury  the 
titled  author  had  spent  his  early  years  ;  otherwise  the 
evidences  of  unhappiness  and  distemper  of  mind  in  his 
poetry  might  have  been  more  intelligible  to  them. 

The  real  Byron  at  this  period,  however,  though  he 
had  his  moods  of  passionate  melanchoby,  was  far  from 
being  habitually  joyless  and  misanthropic,  consumed  by 
a  mysterious  sadness.  He  was  prone  to  extremes,  as 
might  have  been  expected  from  the  descendant  of  such 
ancestry.  He  came  of  turbulent  kin  on  both  sides.  He 
was  tempestuous  in  all  his  feelings,  extreme  in  anger 
and  extreme  in  affection,  in  melancholy  and  in  mirth,  but 
the  pendulum  swung  as  often  to  the  one  side  as  to  the 
other.  For  every  height  there  is  a  hollow.  We  hear 
of  his  fits  of  ungovernable  temper  in  his  childhood,  of 
his  silent,  sullen  rages,  of  his  falling  in  love  at  the  age 
of  eight  with  such  precocious  intensity  that  years  after- 
ward the  mention  of  the  marriage  of  the  girl  nearly 
choked  him  with  jealous  fury.  But  there  is  a  brighter 
side  to  the  picture,  though  that  is  not  so  often  dwelt 


264  BYKON 

upon.     Those  who  were  set  in  authority  over  him,  from 
his  nurse,  Mary  Gray,  to  his  tutor  at  Harrow,  found  him 
extremely  sweet-tempered  and   affectionate  when  they 
treated  him  with  kindness.     He  was  by  no  means  unruly 
when  he  was  not  crossed  and  thwarted  and  misunder- 
stood  in   his   playful    advances,   though  he   was   then 
resentful  enough.     Like  all  people  of  extravagant  sensi- 
bilities, he  was  exacting  in  his  claims  for  a  return  of 
affection,  and  quick  to  take  offence  when  the  response 
was   not   as   ardent    as   he  thought  he  had  a  right  to 
expect  from  the  warmth  of  his  overtures.     It  is  not  a 
good  constitution  of  mind  for  happiness  in  this  world, 
where  individuals  are  not  always  ready  to  reciprocate  ; 
but  it  is  as  far  removed  as  possible  from  the  hard,  sullen, 
misanthropic  temperament  that  remains  sealed  up  in  its 
own  moroseness,  impervious  to  any  touch  of  kindness. 
Byron  is  often  described  as  a  morbid  egotist  ;  but  his 
egotism,  if  such  it  is  to  be  called,  took  the  form  of  an 
intense  longing  for  sympathy  ;  it  was  not,  at  least,  a  cold, 
self-contained  egotism,  or  an  egotism  that  demands  more 
than  it  is  willing  to  give,  but  an  intemperate  craving  for 
an  interchange  of  kindly  offices,  apt,  only  as  such  feel- 
ings are,  to  be  chilled  and  embittered  when   it   meets 
with  an  irresponsive  or  hostile  object.     When  we  read 
the   record   of   his   school   and  college   friendships,  of 
which  there  are  numerous  and  eloquent  memorials  in  his 
first  published  poems,  and  compare  this  with  the  moods 
of  Childe  Harold,  who  described  his  friends  as  : 

"  The  flatterers  of  the  festal  hour, 
The  heartless  parasites  of  present  cheer," 

we  can  understand  Byron's  saying  that  he  would  not 
for  all  the  world  that  his  character  were  like  his  hero's. 
Some  of  his  critics  endeavor  to  give  an  unfavorable 
color  even  to  his  friendships,  by  representing  that  he 
chose  his  friends  from  a  rank  beneath  his  own— boys 
and  youths  who  might  flatter  his  vanity  by  their  grati- 


"  HOURS    OF    IDLENESS  "  265 

tude  for  Lis  patronage.  But  all  his  school  and  college 
friends  were  not  beneath  him  in  rank.  The  critics  for- 
get this,  and  forget  also  that,  owing  to  Byron's  early 
training,  he  was  likely  to  feel  most  at  home  with  his 
poorer  school-fellows,  and  that  from  the  same  cause  he 
was  more  likely  to  feel  sympathy  with  poverty  and  be 
disposed  to  relieve  it. 

It  was  a  necessary  incident  of  Byron's  high  spirit  and 
cravinsr  for  love  and  friendship  and  admiration  that  he 
should  be  inordinately  ambitious.  If  he  had  not  been 
lame,  he  might,  with  his  taste  for  an  active  life  and  the 
traditions  of  his  family  before  him,  have  realized  his 
boyish  dream  of  raising  and  commanding  a  regiment. 
Failing  this,  his  ambition  seems  at  first  to  have  been 
toward  the  distinction  of  an  orator,  and  he  was  noted  at 
school  for  his  declamatory  powers.  He  did  not,  in  fact, 
abandon  this  ambition  till  "  he  awoke  one  morning  and 
found  himself  famous"  as  a  poet.  Only  two  days 
before  he  had  made  his  first  speech  in  the  House  of 
Loi'ds,  and  had  achieved  a  decided  success  in  that  fas- 
tidious assemblage.  But  his  school-days  fell  in  the  time 
when  one  great  poet  after  another  was  rising  into  fame, 
and,  always  sensitive  to  the  influence  of  circumstances, 
he  began  to  try  his  hand  at  verses.  The  applause  of 
friends  induced  him  to  appeal  to  a  wider  audience,  and 
in  his  nineteenth  year  he  issued  with  memorable  results 
a  small  volume  entitled  "  Hours  of  Idleness."  The  pref- 
ace to  this  is  very  characteristic.  We  can  trace  all 
through  a  curious  struggle  between  modesty  and  pride, 
a  disposition  to  be  conciliatory  and  estimate  his  efforts 
modestly,  crossed  every  now  and  then  by  a  haughty 
consciousness  of  real  power.  There  are  several  expres- 
sions peculiai'ly  interesting  in  the  light  of  his  subsequent 
career.  "  I  have  hazarded  my  reputation  and  feelings 
in  publishing  this  volume,"  he  said.  "  I  have  passed 
the  Rubicon,  and  must  stand  or  fall  by  the  cast  of  the 
die."     This  serious  language,  appropriate  to  an  enter- 


266  BTROK 

prise  in  the  issue  of  which  the  writer  was  deeply  inter- 
ested, is  hardly  in  keeping  with  his  protestations  further 
on  of  indifference,  with  his  offer  to  submit  without  a 
murmur  to  the  verdict  of  the  critics,  or  with  the  state- 
ments that  poetry  is  not  his  primary  vocation,  that  he 
will  be  content  with  whatever  credit  he  may  get  from 
this  volume,  and  that  "it  is  highly  improbable,  from  his 
situation  and  pursuits  hereafter,  that  he  should  obtrude 
himself  a  second  time  upon  the  public."  Upon  one 
point  he  was  very  explicit — that  he  wished  no  consider- 
ation at  the  hands  of  critics  on  the  ground  of  his  rank  : 
he  "  would  rather  incur  the  bitterest  censure  of  anony- 
mous criticism  than  triumph  in  honors  granted  merely 
to  a  title."  There  was,  however,  a  somewhat  ungener- 
ous comparison  suggested  between  himself  and  bards 
who  lived  in  elevated  residences  in  the  close  air  of  towns, 
and  made  money  by  their  writings  ;  and  this,  combined 
with  many  references  to  his  rank  and  his  youth  and  the 
seats  of  his  ancestors  in  the  poems  themselves,  was 
seized  upon  by  the  Edinburgh  Review  and  made  the  theme 
of  a  very  cutting  article.  "  Whatever  judgment,"  said 
the  reviewer,  who  is  generally  supposed  to  have  been 
Lord  Brougham,  "  may  be  passed  on  the  poems  of  this 
noble  minor,  it  seems  we  must  take  them  as  we  find  them, 
and  be  content;  for  they  are  the  last  we  shall  ever 
have  from  him.  He  is  at  best,  he  says,  but  an  intruder 
into  the  groves  of  Parnassus;  he  never  lived  in  a  garret, 
like  thoroughbred  poets  ;  and  '  though  he  once  roved  a 
careless  mountaineer  in  the  Highlands  of  Scotland,'  he 
has  not  of  late  enjoyed  this  advantage.  Moreover,  he 
expects  no  profit  from  his  publication;  and  whether  it 
succeeds  or  not  '  it  is  highly  improbable,  from  his  situa- 
tion and  pursuits  hereafter,'  that  he  should  again  conde- 
scend to  become  an  author.  Therefore,  let  us  take  what 
we  get,  and  be  thankful.  What  right  have  we  poor 
devils  to  be  nice  ?  We  are  well  off  to  have  got  so 
much  from  a  man  of  this  lord's  station  ;  who  does  not 


"  ENGLISH    BARDS    AND    SCOTCH    REVIEWERS  "      267 

live  in  a  garret,  but  has  the  sway  of  Newstead  Abbey. 
Again,  we  say,  let  us  be  thankful,  and,  with  honest 
Sancho,  bid  God  bless  the  giver,  nor  look  the  gift-horse 
in  the  mouth." 

Byron  writhed  under  this  ridicule,  all  the  more  gall- 
ing that  it  was  accompanied  by  a  contemptuous  judg- 
ment that  his  poetry  belonged  to  the  class  which  neither 
gods  nor  men  are  said  to  approve,  and  that  his  effusions 
were  spread  over  a  dead  flat,  and  could  no  more  get 
above  or  below  that  level  than  if  they  were  so  much 
stagnant  water.  We  need  not  pause  to  consider  whether 
the  criticism  was  just  or  unjust  ;  the  poems  are  of 
interest  now  only  as  throwing  light  on  his  character  ; 
and  if  they  were  mediocre,  and  neither  particularly 
good  nor  particularly  bad,  the  same  fault  could  not  be 
alleged  against  the  productions  to  which  this  criticism 
led.  The  poet  greatly  misjudged  himself  when  he 
promised  submission  without  a  murmur.  He  resolved 
instantly  upon  revenge.  The  common  story  ran  that 
immediately  on  reading  the  review  he  drank  two  bottles 
of  claret,  conceived  the  plan  of  a  bitter  satire  on  "  Eng- 
lish Bards  and  Scotch  Reviewers,"  and  sat  down  and 
wrote  a  hundred  lines  of  it  at  a  single  sitting.  It  is  pos- 
sible that  he  did  this  ;  but  it  would  seem  from  a  passage 
in  Moore's  Life  that  long  before  the  appearance  of  the 
article  he  had  a  satire  of  the  kind  lying  by  him,  and  that 
the  attack  only  gave  him  a  motive  for  remodelling  and 
publishing  it,  and  inspired  some  of  the  more  bitter  pas- 
sages. It  was  fourteen  months  after  the  article  that 
the  satire  in  reply  made  its  appearance,  and  it  created  a 
great  sensation — as  well  by  its  trenchant  force  as  by 
the  boldness  and  gallantry  of  the  youth  in  tackling  the 
Edinburgh  lievieto,  then  in  the  height  of  its  formidable 
critical  supremacy.  It  is  possible  that  during  the  year 
and  more  that  elapsed  Byron's  wrath  might  have 
evaporated,  and  that  he  might  have  come  to  the  con- 
clusion, which  he  afterward  expressed,  that  it  was  "a 
21 


268  BYEON 

miserable  record  of  misplaced  anger  and  indiscriminate 
acrimony,"  if  the  severity  of  the  Edinburgh  Review 
had  been  counterbalanced  by  any  warmth  of  recognition 
and  appreciation  from  other  quarters.  If  any  of  the 
poets  of  the  time  had  protested  against  the  injustice  of 
the  review,  if  his  volume  had  opened  the  doors  of 
society  to  him  as  "  Childe  Harold  "  afterward  did,  if 
his  relative  and  guardian,  Lord  Carlisle,  had  given  any 
recognition  of  his  ability  or  shown  any  sympathy  with 
his  aspirations,  Byron,  always  prompt  to  respond  to 
kindness  and  affection,  would  certainly  not  have  retali- 
ated with  indiscriminate  acrimony,  bringing  within  the 
sweep  of  his  anger  not  merely  the  Scotch  reviewers  who 
had  attacked  him,  but  the  English  bards  who  had 
received  his  adventure  with  silent  indifference.  He 
would  not  have  had  the  same  motive  for  making  them 
disagreeably  aware  of  his  existence  and  of  his  power. 
But  as  it  was,  no  recognition  came  to  counteract  the 
effect  of  the  hostile  criticism,  and  he  came  to  the  reso- 
lution to  pay  off  his  score  against  the  whole  world  of 
literature,  and  go  abroad.  The  friendlessness  of  his 
position  was,  as  I  have  said,  brought  still  more  painfully 
home  to  him  by  the  circumstances  attending  his  coming 
of  age  and  his  introduction  to  the  House  of  Lords. 

The  study  of  Byron's  life  before  he  began  the  pil- 
grimage of  Childe  Harold  thus  shows  us  that  he  was  a 
very  different  man  from  the  pilgrim,  who  is  represented 
as  a  youth  who  had  been  rendered  misanthropic  and 
scornfully  indifferent  to  every  thing  that  poor  human 
life  could  yield  by  an  unbroken  course  of  sycophantic 
flattery  and  unbridled  self-indulgence.  Though  Byron 
took  the  incidents  of  the  travels  from  his  own  experience 
and  put  his  own  reflections  into  the  mouth  of  the  pil- 
grim, he  undoubtedl}r,  as  he  himself  said,  took  the  con- 
ception of  the  character  from  Dr.  John  Moore's  "  Zeluco." 
All  the  same,  the  identification  of  the  poet  with  his  own 
creation  laid  firm  hold  of  the  public  mind,  and  helped 


THE   POET'S    UNCONQUERABLE    SHYNESS  269 

to  strengthen  the  impression  produced  by  the  poem. 
The  real  Lord  Byron,  as  we  know  him  in  Moore's  Life, 
would  have  been  a  much  less  romantic  and  interesting 
character  to  the  generality  of  readers. 

From  the  winter  of  1812  till  his  death  in  the  spring 
of  1824  Byron  kept  his  position  as  the  foremost  poet, 
the  greatest  literary  force,  of  his  generation,  every  year 
bringing  some  new  revelation  of  his  amazing  power  and 
fertility.  At  first  the  poet's  popularity  threatened  to 
be  fatal  to  the  development  of  his  genius.  Society, 
which  had  received  the  productions  of  his  nonage  with 
indifference,  and  had  applauded  the  spirit  of  his  vindic- 
tive satire  without  exhibiting  much  curiosity  about  the 
author,  opened  its  arms  immediately  to  the  powerful 
assault  of  the  pilgrim.  Congratulations  and  invitations 
were  showered  upon  him  from  a  fashionable  world 
which  had  hitherto  ignored  the  existence  of  the  impover- 
ished lord  of  Newstead  Abbey,  too  proud  and  shy  to 
push  any  claim  to  their  acquaintance.  He  went  every- 
where as  a  lion,  as  the  most  interesting  lion  that  had 
been  on  exhibition  for  many  years,  and  he  accepted  this 
change  in  his  circumstances  with  all  the  impressionable 
facility  of  his  character.  A  certain  contempt  may  have 
mingled  with  his  pleasure  in  the  sweet  taste  of  social 
homage,  a  certain  bitterness  when  he  thought  how  he 
had  been  neglected  before  ;  but  he  had  too  much  of  the 
milk  of  human  kindness  in  him  not  to  be  delighted  with 
his  popularity.  There  was  only  one  drawback  to  his 
pleasure,  an  unconquerable  shyness.  He  was  not  at 
his  ease  in  mixed  society.  He  had  never  in  his  life  been 
accustomed  to  it,  and  his  sudden  introduction  as  an 
object  of  universal  attention  was  not  calculated  to  put 
him  at  his  ease.  But  this  constraint  and  embarrassment, 
which  would  probably  have  worn  off  in  time,  did  not 
prevent  him  from  deriving  much  enjoyment  from  his 
new  position,  and  in  the  company  of  his  familiars  he 
threw  off  his  reserve  and  srave  free  rein  to  his  hicdi 


2*70  BYRON 

spirits,  while  the  public,  deceived  by  an  attitude  due 
more  to  shyness  than  to  pride,  gave  him  credit  for  all  the 
inward  gloom  and  meditative  joylessness  of  the  hero  of 
the  pilgrimage.  The  idolizing  of  Byron  lasted  for  four 
years,  and  if  it  had  lasted  longer,  his  genius  would  prob- 
ably have  been  stifled  before  it  reached  its  maturity.  He 
produced  his  least  important  work  in  those  four  years, 
as  a  result  of  accommodating  himself  to  the  spirit  of  the 
society  which  lavished  flattery  and  admiration  on  him. 
He  belonged  to  the  not  uncommon  class  of  men  who 
cannot  exert  their  full  powers  without  the  stimulus  of 
adversity  and  opposition.  There  was  a  rage  at  the 
time  for  Oriental  tales.  It  was  in  the  year  of  Byron's 
entrance  into  fame  and  society,  as  you  may  remember, 
that  Moore  made  his  contract  with  the  Longmans  for  a 
poem  on  an  Oriental  subject.  Byron  had  been  in  the 
East,  and  had  been  besides  an  omnivorous  reader  of 
Eastern  history,  and  he  set  himself  to  supply  the  same 
fashionable  demand,  producing  in  marvellously  quick 
succession  "  The  Giaour,"  "  The  Bride  of  Abydos," 
"  The  Corsair,"  "  Lara,"  and  "  The  Siege  of  Corinth." 
The  tales  were  full  of  life  and  color,  and  their  melo- 
dramatic heroes  and  incidents  fairly  eclipsed  in  popular 
favor  Scott's  mediaeval  barons  and  nuns,  Highland 
bandits  and  Lowland  moss-troopers.  But  they  belong 
to  a  much  lower  range  of  artistic  creation  than  Byron's 
later  work.  Again  the  world  paid  him  the  equivocal 
compliment  of  identifying  him  with  his  gloomy,  self- 
contained,  man-defying  heroes,  even  circulating  the 
myth  that  he  had  himself  been  a  remorseless  pirate  dur- 
ing his  wanderings  in  the  East  ;  and  he  was  vain 
enough,  mainly,  I  believe,  to  cover  with  romantic  mystery 
a  reserved  manner  really  due  to  shyness,  to  encourage 
rather  than  discourage  the  belief.  The  Nemesis  for  this 
masquei'ading  soon  overtook  him,  but  we  cannot  regret 
it  much,  seeing  that  if  he  had  continued  an  admired 
member  of  fashionable  society  his  work  as  a  poet  would 


LADY  BYRON  LEAVES  THE  POET         271 

never  have  reached  the  same  depth  and  grandeur. 
"  Society,"  as  he  afterward  felt  and  said,  "  is  fatal  to  all 
great  original  undertakings  ; "  it  is  certainly  fatal  to 
undertakings  in  the  spirit  of  Byron's  subsequent  works. 
We  have  a  measure  of  what  satisfied  the  society  of  the 
Prince  Regent's  Court  in  Moore's  "  Lalla  Rookh,"  and 
Byron's  own  metrical  tales. 

It  was  in  the  consequences  of  an  unfortunate  marriage 
that  Byron  paid  the  penalty  for  the  public  conception 
of  him  as  a  monstrous  Childe  Harold  or  a  Lara.  I  need 
not  dwell  upon  the  incidents  of  that  brief  union.  He 
was  married  to  Miss  Milbanke  on  the  2d  of  January, 
1815.  A  daughter  was  born  on  the  10th  of  December. 
On  the  13th  of  January  next  Lady  Byron  left  home  on 
a  visit  to  her  parents,  and  on  the  way  wrote  an  affec- 
tionate letter  to  her  husband,  beginning  "Dear  Duck," 
and  ending  "Your  Pippin."  A  few  days  after  her 
father  wrote  to  say  that  she  could  not  return  to  him, 
and  proceedings  were  at  once  commenced  for  a  judicial 
separation.  The  reasons  for  this  strange  rupture  must 
always  remain  a  mystery  and  a  subject  for  dispute. 
"  The  causes,"  Byron  once  said,  "  were  too  simple  easily 
to  be  found  out."  There  certainly  is  not  the  slightest 
foundation  for  the  abominable  calumny  published  some 
eighteen  years  ago  by  Mrs.  Beecher  Stowe  on  Lady 
Byron's  authority.  As  soon  as  that  charge  was  made 
public  indisputable  proofs  were  forthcoming,  in  the  shape 
of  affectionate  letters,  that  Lady  Byron  remained  on 
intimate  terms  with  Mrs.  Leigh,  and  if  she  then  enter- 
tained the  suspicion  which  she  afterward  communicated 
to  Mrs.  Stowe,  she  deserves  to  go  down  to  posterity  as 
one  of  the  worst  specimens  of  her  sex.  At  the  time, 
with  admirable  self-control,  she  maintained  impenetra- 
ble silence  as  to  her  reasons  for  deserting  her  husband, 
with  the  result  that  the  British  public,  regarding  Lord 
Byron  as  a  Childe  Harold  or  a  Lara,  imagined  that  the 
reasons  must  be  too  dreadful  for  publication,  and  made 


272  BYRON 

up  for  the  lack  of  facts  by  the  wildest  creations  of  fane}'. 
If  the  case  is  looked  at  calmly,  a  simple  explanation  is  not 
difficult  to  find.  A  woman  who  could  ask  such  a  hus- 
band in  a  voice  of  provoking  sweetness  "  when  he  meant 
to  give  up  his  bad  habit  of  making  verses,"  a  woman 
who  never  lost  her  temper,  never  gave  up  her  point,  and 
inflicted  the  most  malignant  stabs  in  the  tenderest  places 
with  angelic  coolness,  possessed  the  power  of  goading  a 
sensitive,  impetuous  man  to  frenzy.  She  had  a  maid, 
for  example,  to  whom  Byron  entertained  a  violent  aver- 
sion, because  he  suspected  her  of  poisoning  his  wife's 
mind  against  him.  Lady  Byron  listened  to  all  his 
furious  tirades  with  unruffled  meekness,  but  never  con- 
sented to  send  the  woman  away.  She  was  quite  as  jeal- 
ous of  her  dignity,  quite  as  resentful  of  slights,  real  or 
supposed,  as  himself  ;  and  in  their  differences  of  opinion 
she  had  the  inestimable  advantage  of  a  temper  perfectly 
under  control,  and  a  command  of  all  the  sweet  resigna- 
tion of  a  martyr,  combined  with  the  most  skilful  inge- 
nuity of  provoking  retort.  Byron,  with  his  liability  to 
fits  of  uncontrollable  passion,  could  never  have  been  an 
easy  man  to  live  with  ;  but  if  his  wife  had  been  a  loving, 
warm-hearted  woman,  with  the  unconscious  tact  that 
such  women  have,  the  result  would  probably  have  been 
very  different. 

For  a  few  weeks  after  Lady  Byron  left  her  husband 
society  was  content  with  house-to-house  rumor  and  com- 
ment ;  but  presently  the  indiscretion  of  one  of  the  poet's 
friends  gave  an  opportunity  for  public  remarks  on  the 
case,  and  Byron's  character  being  prejudiced  by  the 
identification  with  the  worst  heroes  of  his  poetry,  that 
howl  of  indignation  was  set  up  which  is  so  graphically 
described  by  Macaulay.  Byron,  in  a  tender  and  remorse- 
ful fit,  had  written  a  farewell  to  his  wife.  There  was 
no  reason  to  doubt  the  sincerity  of  his  feelings  ;  as  we 
now  know,  the  tears  fell  from  his  eyes  on  the  paper  as 
he  wrote  the  lines.     A  friend  to  whom  he  showed  this 


bykon's  farewell  to  his  wife  273 

farewell,  thinking  that  it  might  counteract  the  rumors 
that  were  in  circulation  against  him,  sent  it  to  a  news- 
paper. But  the  public  regarded  it  as  an  attempt  to 
prejudice  them  against  the  wife  by  representing  her  as 
harsh  and  unforgiving,  while  he  on  his  side  was  willing 
to  be  reconciled;  and  when  it  was  followed  soon  after 
by  the  scathing  sketch  of  Mrs.  Clermont,  the  maid  whom 
he  suspected  of  poisoning  Lady  Byron's  mind  against 
him,  the  outcry  became  loud  and  indignant,  and  the 
poet,  burning  under  a  sense  of  injustice,  but  roused  at 
last  to  return  scorn  for  scorn,  went  off  once  more  on  a 
pilgrimage  from  England,  vowing  never  to  retuim. 

Once  more,  after  his  four  years  of  sunshine,  in  revolt 
against  societjr,  distempered, 

"Like  sweet  bells  jangled,  harsh  and  out  of  tune," 

Byron  became  the  exponent  of  the  restlessness,  the  dis- 
content, the  passionate  longings  of  a  time  that  was,  like 
himself,  "out  of  joint."  And  the  greatest  of  his  works 
were  written  during  the  remaining  eight  3rears  of  his 
life,  before  he  perished  in  the  Greek  war  of  independence, 
and  the  extent  of  these,  quite  apart  from  their  quality, 
is  a  standing  sufficient  answer  to  the  exaggerated  re- 
ports that  were  circulated  about  him  in  the  country 
from  which  he  had  withdrawn.  I  am  glad  to  see  that 
Mrs.  Oliphant,  in  her  recent  work  on  the  "  English  Lit- 
erature from  1790  to  1825,"  written  with  most  admira- 
ble judgment,  breadth  of  sympathy,  and  easy  mastery 
of  her  materials,  does  not  incline  to  a  very  prevalent 
impression  that  Byron's  reputation  is  on  the  wane.  In 
purely  literary  circles  no  doubt  it  has  been  for  a  genera- 
tion or  more,  because  it  is  the  tendenc}^  now  to  judge 
poets  mainly  by  their  technical  qualities,  and  it  is  not 
in  minute  finish  or  exactly  interpretative  felicitj^  that 
Byron's  strength  lies.  His  feeling  was  too  deep,  his 
thought  too  impetuous,  to  admit  of  his  being  a  great 


214  BYRON 

verbal  artist,  like  Tennyson  or  like  Carlyle.  We  must 
take  his  achievement  as  a  whole,  if  we  wish  to  give  him 
his  due  rank  in  literature.  His  singular  sensitiveness  to 
the  impressions  of  his  own  immediate  surroundings  is 
against  the  permanence  of  his  fame,  because  living  as  he 
did  in  a  time  of  unrest  and  conflict,  and  reflecting  these 
characters  in  his  poetry,  he  is  apt  to  appear  hysterical, 
affected,  and  unreal  to  people  who  look  at  him  out  of  a 
calmer  atmosphere.  On  the  other  hand,  the  superficial 
inconsistencies  of  his  character  must  always  tempt 
critics  who  have  a  liking  for  difficult  problems.  He  is 
like  Hamlet  in  this  respect,  as  I  have  elsewhere  said  be- 
fore. In  the  desolation  of  his  youth,  in  his  moodiness, 
in  his  distempered  variation  between  the  extremes  of 
laughter  and  tears,  in  his  yearning  for  sympathy,  his 
intensity  of  friendship,  his  fits  of  misanthropy,  his 
habit  of  brooding  over  the  mysteries  of  life,  Byron  un- 
consciously played  the  part  of  Hamlet  with  the  world 
for  his  stage,  and  left  a  kindred  problem  for  the  wonder 
of  mankind  and  the  puzzled  speculation  of  the  curious 
in  such  matters. 


CHAPTER  XVIII 

NOVELISTS    FROM   MRS.    RADCLIFFE   TO     BULWER     LYTTON 

STERNE — MISS  EDGEWORTH — HANNAH  MORE — JANE  AUSTEN — 
"  WAVERLEY  "  —  MISS  MITFORD  —  MRS.  SHELLEY  —  "  VIVIAN 
GREY  " — "  PELHAM  " 

I  mentioned  in  a  previous  lecture  on  novelists  that 
in  the  half  century  or  more  between  Sterne — the  last  of 
the  great  group  of  novelists  in  the  middle  of  the  eigh- 
teenth century — and  Scott,  between  "Tristram  Shandy" 
and  "  Waverley,"  the  chief  honors  of  novel-writing  were 
carried  off  by  women — Miss  Burney,  Mrs.  Radcliffe, 
Miss  Edgeworth,  and  Miss  Austen.  These  four  names 
stand  out  above  the  crowd  as  being  not  imitators,  but 
writers  of  sufficient  original  genius  and  sufficiently  for- 
tunate in  the  novelty  of  their  subjects  to  be  ranked  as 
leaders,  as  founders  of  schools  or  epochs  in  a  small  way. 
I  have  already  spoken  of  the  first  two,  whose  triumphs 
lay  within  the  eighteenth  century  ;  I  will  now  say  a 
few  words  to  indicate  the  historical  position  of  Miss 
Edgeworth  and  Miss  Austen. 

Miss  Edgeworth  was  about  four  years. older  than 
Scott,  being  born  in  1767,  but  she  had  fourteen  years 
the  start  of  him  in  reputation  as  a  novelist.  Her  first 
notable  production  was  "  Castle  Rackrent,"  in  the  first 
year  of  the  century,  1800,  fourteen  years  before  "Wa- 
verley." It  broke  ground  in  a  new  field,  afterward 
worked  to  excess  by  craftsmen  and  craftswomen  of  all 
degrees  of  merit  ;  it  was  a  story  of  Irish  life,  a  revela- 
tion to  the  English  novel-readers  of  a  new  condition  of 
society,  a  new  range  of  character  and  emotion.  Scott 
afterward  said  of  Miss  Edgeworth's  Irish  tales  that  they 


276        FROM    MKS.  RADCLIFFE   TO    BULWEK   LYTTON 

had  done  more  to  bind  Irishmen  and  Englishmen  to- 
gether than  the  Union.  She  certainly  elevated  the 
character  of  the  Irish  peasantry  in  the  interest  of  the 
world,  showing  the  good  and  amiable  qualities  that 
underlay  the  too  obvious  indolence  and  thriftlessness 
and  squalor — the  gayety  of  heart,  the  readiness  of  wit, 
the  tenacious  steadfastness  of  attachment,  the  helpful 
generosity  in  distress.  Miss  Edgeworth  was  a  realist, 
and  she  did  not  fail  to  put  the  unfavorable  traits  into 
her  picture  ;  but  she  treated  the  failings  of  the  Irish 
tenderly,  as  if  she  loved  them  on  the  whole.  The  Paddy 
of  fiction  and  the  stage  is  really  her  creation  ;  she  is 
the  author  of  his  existence  in  literature,  of  the  sly, 
ready-witted,  fluent,  faithful,  and  generous  Paddy. 
Herself  the  daughter  of  an  Irish  landowner,  Edgeworth 
of  Edgeworthstown,  she  had  not  seen  Ireland  till  she 
was  sixteen,  and  was  thus  all  the  better  fitted  to  be  im- 
pressed with  the  peculiarities  that  might  have  escaped 
her  notice  if  she  had  lived  among  them  from  infancy. 
She  was  brought  very  closely  in  contact  with  the  poor 
people  of  Ireland  as  well  as  with  the  landed  families  of 
various  ranks,  for  her  father,  an  enthusiastic  man  of 
progress,  full  of  eighteenth-century  philanthropic  and 
educational  theories,  and  ever  ready  to  make  ingenious 
experiments  of  his  own,  having  resolved  to  reside  on  his 
Irish  estates,  resolved  also  to  get  rid  of  middlemen  as 
the  curse  of  the  land  system,  and  employed  his  daughter 
practically  as  his  steward  and  factor.  For  years  of  her 
life  she  had  every  dajr  to  grant  interviews  to  her  father's 
tenants,  hear  excuses  and  grievances,  settle  disputes, 
answer  petitions;  and  on  rent  days  more  particularly 
her  hands  were  full.  Miss  Edgeworth's  knowledge  of 
Irish  life  was  thus  most  intimate,  and  she  had  a  keen 
eye  for  the  humorous  side  of  it,  while  her  observations 
were  not  permitted  to  degenerate  into  aimless  caricature 
or  disguised  satire  by  good-sense  and  real  sympathy 
with  the  people.     "  Castle   Rackrent  "  is  the  story  of 


MISS    EDGEWORTll's    "  CASTLE    RACKRENT  "         277 

an  Irish  landed  family,  put  into  the  mouth  of  an  old 
steward  who  in  his  time  had  served  several  landlords  of 
the  stock  in  succession — Sir  Patrick,  Sir  Murtagh,  Sir 
Kit,  and  Sir  Condey,  men  of  different  character,  but  all 
agreeing  in  doing  their  best,  whether  by  lavish  ex- 
penditure, gambling,  or  avaricious  litigation,  to  help  on 
the  ruin  consummated  by  the  last  of  the  series.  The 
faithful  old  retainer  admires  them  all  with  all  their  faults, 
and  seen  through  his  indulgent  eyes  their  crimes  and 
their  follies,  their  freaks  of  wild  expenditure,  and  their 
matter-of-course  extortions  from  their  tenantry,  their 
love-making,  their  hospitality,  their  family  quarrels, 
and  the  dealings  all  the  time  of  the  too  faithful  steward 
with  the  artful  tenants,  excite  in  the  reader  an  extraor- 
dinary mixture  of  laughter  and  pity. 

Miss  Edgeworth  never  surpassed  this  her  first  work 
of  note,  and  in  some  respects- did  not  again  come  up  to 
it.  She  had  been  engaged  before  with  her  father  in 
writing  stories  for  children,  stories  with  a  moral  and 
educational  purpose.  It  was  the  age  when  Hannah 
More's  tales,  intended  to  counteract  the  influence  of  the 
French  Revolution  and  teach  the  common  people  to 
rely  upon  the  virtues  of  content,  sobriety,  humility, 
industry,  reverence  for  the  British  Constitution,  trust 
in  God,  and  in  the  kindness  of  the  gentry,  were  circu- 
lating: in  thousands  and  hundreds  of  thousands.  It  was 
natural  that  moralists,  in  a  generation  distinguished  for 
its  philanthropic  endeavor,  all  the  more  conspicuous 
that  philanthropy  was  a  new  passion  among  the  upper 
classes — it  was  natural  that  in  a  generation  which  pro- 
duced Wilberforce  and  Clarkson,  the  agitation  for  the 
abolition  of  the  slave-trade,  and  the  impeachment  of 
Warren  Hastings  for  the  oppression  of  the  Hindus, 
moralists  should  try  to  press  into  their  service  the 
revived  art  of  story-telling,  for  the  productions  of  which 
the  reading  public  were  so  clamorous.  Miss  Edgeworth 
is  sometimes  called  the   inventor  of  the  novel  with  a 


278         FROM    MRS.   RADCLIFFE    TO    BULWER    LYTTON 

purpose  ;  but  it  was  really  the  invention  of  the  age,  and 
I  don't  think  she  can  claim  the  merit  of  being  the  first 
in  the  field.  She  was,  perhaps,  the  first  novelist  with  a 
purpose  entitled  to  high  rank  on  purely  artistic  grounds. 
It  was  her  father  apparently,  between  whom  and  herself 
there  was  the  closest  confidence,  and  who  was  from  first 
to  last  her  literary  director,  dictator,  and  censor, — not 
wholly,  it  is  supposed,  to  the  advantage  of  her  art, — who 
insisted  upon  her  devoting  her  talents  to  the  purpose  of 
moral  education.  The  fact  certainly  is  in  support  of 
this  prevalent  belief,  that  "  Castle  Rackrent "  was  the 
only  novel  written  by  her  without  his  superintendence. 
She  eluded  her  director  in  this,  and  wrote  it  as  a  little 
surprise  for  him.  And  it  is  the  only  one  of  her  novels 
that  has  no  obvious  and  obtruded  lesson.  There  is  no 
harm,  even  from  the  artistic  point  of  view,  in  writing 
novels  with  a  moral  purpose.  Novelists,  whether  they 
intend  it  or  not,  by  the  very  fact  that  they  represent 
human  beings  in  action,  and  so  furnish  examples  that 
readers,  consciously  or  unconsciously,  imitate,  just  as 
they  imitate  their  own  companions  in  real  life,  must  influ- 
ence conduct ;  from  the  very  nature  of  their  art  they  can- 
not avoid  influencing  conduct ;  and  it  is  desirable  that 
they  should  endeavor  to  influence  conduct  for  the  better, 
and  not  for  the  worse.  But  they  are  apt  to  miss  their  aim 
as  well  as  injure  their  story  by  making  the  behavior  of 
their  characters  unnatural,  and  the  incidents  that  befall 
them  impossible,  if  they  allow  the  deliberate  enforce- 
ment of  a  moral  to  influence  the  probable  evolution  of  a 
story  out  of  given  characters  and  given  circumstances. 
Miss  Edgeworth  fell  into  this  error  in  several  of  her 
stories  with  a  purpose.  In  "  Belinda,"  for  example,  one 
of  her  tales  of  fashionable  life,  one  of  the  most  brill- 
iantly drawn  characters  in  fiction,  Lady  Delacour,  is 
converted  by  the  force  of  circumstances  from  a  gay, 
heartless,  daringly  cynical  leader  of  fashion  into  a  model 
wife,  and  that,  too,  after  years  of  outrageous  frivolity. 


NOVELS    WRITTEN    WITH    A    MORAL   PURPOSE        279 

In  another  story,  "  Ennui,"  Lord  Glentliorne,  a  young 
nobleman  so  rich  that  he  has  no  interest  in  any  thing, 
and  spends  his  time  till  he  reaches  middle  life  in  torpid 
vacuity  and  listless  search  for  amusement,  is  suddenly 
changed  by  the  loss  of  his  fortune  into  a  model  of 
industry,  applying  himself  with  indefatigable  persever- 
ance to  the  most  repulsive  studies,  and  distancing  every 
competitor  in  fields  to  which  the}'  have  given  the  appli- 
cation of  all  their  lives  and  all  their  abilities.  Such 
sudden  revolutions  of  habits  in  middle  life  are  not  true 
to  nature  ;  long-confirmed  habits  are  not  thrown  off  by 
real  human  beings  with  such  ease.  The  novelist  repre- 
sents them  as  taking  place,  not  in  her  function  of  a  painter 
of  manners,  but  in  pursuance  of  a  moral  purpose.  Lady 
Delacour's  conversion  is  intended  as  an  encouragement 
to  ladies  of  fashion  to  abandon  heartless  flirtation  and 
vain  display  ;  they  are  supposed  to  be  struck  with  the 
greater  happiness  of  the  lady  in  her  regenerate  condi- 
tion. And  Lord  Glenthorne's  conversion  is  intended  as 
an  incentive  to  noble  lords  to  discard  unworthy  amuse- 
ment, and  experience  the  greater  happiness  of  energies 
devoted  to  nobler  pursuits.  Such  is  the  novelist's  ob- 
vious intention  ;  but  whether  such  pictures  are  likely 
to  do  more  harm  than  good  is  not  so  clear,  for  the  ease 
with  which  these  interesting  reprobates  shake  off  their 
long-indulged  habits  is  apt  to  encourage  would-be  imi- 
tators of  their  ultimate  good  conduct  to  defer  the  period 
of  amendment  till  it  is  too  late.  I  admit,  however,  that 
from  the  moralist's  point  of  view,  quite  apart  from 
strict  adherence  to  human  probabilities,  there  is  some- 
thing to  be  said  on  the  other  side,  and  that  the  delight 
taken  by  the  converts  in  their  altered  course  of  conduct 
may  be  rendered  more  potent  as  an  example  by  the  fact 
that  they  are  represented  as  deriving  no  real  pleasure 
from  the  pleasure-seeking  of  their  un regenerate  days. 
It  would,  however,  give  an  entirely  wrong  idea  of  Miss 
Edgeworth's  novels  to  lay  much  stress  on  their  moral 


280        FROM    MRS.  RADCLIFFE   TO    BULWER   LYTTON 

purpose.  Apart  from  their  purpose,  they  are  most  brill- 
iant pictures  of  life.  The  moral  is  not  constantly 
obtruded,  as  in  Hannah  More's  celebrated  "  Ccelebs  in 
Search  of  a  Wife,"  published  while  Miss  Edge  worth  was 
in  the  height  of  her  popularity.  The  reader,  especially 
the  young  lady  reader,  is  preached  at  from  beginning 
to  end  of  that  excellent  work  ;  the  onty  incidents  in 
Mr.  Ccelebs's  career  are  his  visits  to  various  families  in 
the  course  of  his  deliberate  search,  the  only  surprises 
consist  in  the  discovery  of  weak  points  in  superficially 
pleasing  young  ladies,  and  sterling  qualities  in  the  super- 
ficially unattractive.  We  are  not  led  to  feel  the  slightest 
interest  in  the  issue  of  Mr.  Coelebs's  great  enterprise  ; 
there  is  nothing  shown  in  him  to  make  us  care  whether 
he  finds  a  woman  worthy  of  his  fastidious  choice  or  not. 
Yet  Hannah  More  was  far  from  being  a  dull  writer,  and 
in  the  exposure  of  affectation  and  pretence  and  shallow- 
ness she  showed  a  very  fine  sense  of  humor.  Only,  her 
book  is  not  a  story,  but  a  string  of  journalistic  social 
articles  on  the  minor  and  the  higher  morals.  Now, 
Miss  Edgeworth  is  not  so  avowedly  and  obtrusively 
didactic  as  this.  She  is  seldom  so  clear  and  decided 
in  her  purpose  as,  for  example,  Mr.  Wilkie  Collins  in 
"Heart  and  Science,"  or  Mr.  Besant  in  "All  Sorts  and 
Conditions  of  Men."  She  took  an  interest,  either  for 
herself  or  at  her  father's  instigation,  in  various  social 
reforms,  and  did  her  best  to  advance  them  incidentally, 
as  Dickens  did  in  "Nicholas  Nichleby  "  or  "Dombey 
and  Son."  The  proportion  of  direct  didactic  in  her 
writings  is  really  comparatively  small,  while  her  pictures 
of  life,  as  it  was  to  be  seen  in  fashionable  society  and 
on  Irish  estates,  were  as  faithful  and  complete  as  they 
were  animated,  sensible,  and  humorous.  Miss  Edge- 
worth  must  certainly  be  pronounced  to  have  gone  out  of 
fashion,  seeing  that  Miss  Broughton  ran  a  tale  through 
one  of  the  magazines  with  the  title  of  "  Belinda,"  with- 
out any  body  remarking,  in  print,  at  least,  that  this  was 


miss  austen's  "pride  and  prejudice  281 

the  title  of  one  of  Miss  Eclgeworth's  most  famous 
novels.  Whether  Miss  Zimmern's  pleasantly  written 
biography  in  the  Eminent  Women  of  Letters 
Series  will  do  any  thing  to  restore  her  faded  popu- 
larity is  doubtful  ;  and  yet  novel-readers  who  have 
exhausted  the  novels  of  their  own  generation  might 
do  worse  than  give  "Belinda"  or  "Castle  Rack- 
rent  "  a  trial. 

If  I  were  to  judge  from  my  own  experience,  I  should 
not  recommend  Miss  Austen's  "  Pride  and  Prejudice" 
or  "  Sense  and  Sensibilit}r,"  still  less  "  Mansfield  Park  " 
or  "  Emma,"  with  the  same  confidence  to  confirmed 
novel-readers  of  the  present  day.  Nobody  can  read 
any  of  Miss  Austen's  works  without  admiring  her 
wonderful  closeness  and  keenness  of  humorous  observa- 
tion, the  skill  with  which  she  displays  every  turn  in  the 
motives  of  commonplace  character,  and  the  exquisite 
quality  of  the  ridicule  with  which  her  fancy  dances 
round  and  round  them  as  she  holds  them  up  to  our 
inspection.  If  you  once  make  the  acquaintance  of  the 
Bennet  family  in  "  Pride  and  Prejudice,"  you  can  never 
forget  them,  so  distinctly  is  each  individual  marked, 
and  so  keen  and  exquisite  is  the  revelation  of  their 
foibles.  In  mere  art  of  humorous  portraiture,  in  a 
quieter  and  less  farcical  style  than  Miss  Burney's,  Miss 
Austen  is  an  expert  of  classical  finish.  But  somehow, 
speaking  for  myself,  I  must  confess  to  a  certain  want 
of  interest  in  the  characters  themselves.  Unless  one  is 
really  interested  in  the  subjects  of  such  an  elaborate  art 
of  portraiture,  the  gradual  revelation  of  them,  touch 
after  touch,  is  apt  to  become  tedious,  hoAvever  much 
one  may  enjoy  for  a  time  the  quick  and  delicate  play 
of  the  writer's  gently  malicious  humor.  But  this  want 
of  interest  in  the  characters  of  English  middle-class 
provincial  life  is  of  course  a  personal  defect.  You  will 
find  that  Mrs.  Oliphant  writes  with  rapture  about  her 
great  predecessor  in  fiction,  and  I  dare  sa}r  you  have 


282        FROM    MRS.  RADCLIFFE    TO    BULWER   LTTTON 

read  somewhere  Sir  Walter  Scott's  often-quoted  com- 
pliment to  her.  "  Read  again,  and  for  the  third  time 
at  least,  Miss  Austen's  very  finely  written  '  Pride  and 
Prejudice,' "  he  entered  in  his  Diary.  "  That  young 
lady  had  a  talent  for  describing  the  involvements  and 
feelings  and  characters  of  ordinary  life  which  is  to  me 
the  most  wonderful  I  ever  met  with.  The  big  Bow- 
wow strain  I  can  do  n^self,  like  any  now  going  ;  but 
the  exquisite  touch  which  renders  ordinary  common- 
place things  and  characters  interesting  from  the  truth 
of  the  description  and  the  sentiment  is  denied  to  me. 
What  a  pity  such  a  gifted  creature  die"d  so  early."  Sir 
Walter  also  reviewed  her  novels  in  the  Quarterly, 
and  helped  to  bring  them  into  notice.  In  one  respect 
she  had  a  great  and  legitimate  attraction  for  novel- 
readers  of  her  own  time  that  she  no  longer  possesses. 
Her  field  of  manners-painting  was  new  ;  nobody  before 
her  had  taken  scenes  and  characters  from  the  life  of 
the  provinces,  though  Miss  Barney  had  had  hosts  of 
imitators  in  the  description  of  fashionable  life  in  the 
metropolis.  And  she  had  another  distinction  also,  not 
so  striking  now,  in  the  fact  that  when  fiction  was  over- 
run with  romantic  sentiment  and  improbable  incident, 
workers  in  the  hackneyed  paths  having  reached  a  despi- 
cable level  when  her  first  novel  made  its  appearance  in 
1811,  she  restricted  herself  to  ordinary  every-day  char- 
acter, and  never  went  beyond  probability  either  in  con- 
duct or  in  incident.  Miss  Austen  was  the  daughter  of 
the  rector  of  Steventon,  a  parish  in  Hampshire  ;  and 
after  her  father's  death,  and  before  publishing  her 
novels,  she  lived  for  some  years  with  her  mother  at 
Southampton,  and  for  some  time  at  Bath.  All  the 
material  of  her  novels  is  such  as  might  have  come 
within  the  range  of  her  own  limited  personal  experience, 
and  she  treats  her  characters  and  comments  on  their 
conduct  very  much  as  she  and  her  family  were  in  the 
habit  of  looking  at  and  criticising  the  life  of  their  own 


LADY  MORGAN  AND  HER  AGE         283 

neighborhood.  Hence  the  vividness,  the  fresh  air  of 
reality,  that  is  one  of  the  secrets  of  her  power  as  a 
novelist ;  her  figures  are  not  lay-figures  or  creations  of 
vacuous  fancy,  but  real  men  and  women,  represented 
not  in  accordance  with  any  merely  conventional  canons 
of  art,  but  as  such  characters  presented  themselves  to 
her  in  real  life. 

Another  female  novelist,  who  never  took  the  classical 
rank  accorded  to  Miss  Edgeworth  and  Miss  Austen,  but 
who  was  a  very  conspicuous  and  much-discussed  per- 
sonage in  her  day,  also  achieved  her  first  successes 
before  the  publication  of  "  Waverley."  This  was  Miss 
Sydney  Owenson,  afterward  Lady  Morgan.  With  the 
usual  longevity  of  women  of  letters,  to  which  Miss 
Austen  was  an  exception,  d}'ing  in  1817  at  the  com- 
paratively early  age  of  forty-two,  Lady  Morgan  lived 
and  continued  to  write  till  1859,  although  she  was 
an  eminent  author  several  years  before  Miss  Austen 
emerged  from  the  obscurity  of  Hampshire.  Where  she 
was  born  remained  to  the  last  a  mystery,  and  her 
biographer,  Mr.  Hepworth  Dixon,  respected  her  wishes 
on  the  point,  and  either  did  not  attempt  to  discover  or, 
if  he  did  discover  any  thing,  kept  the  secret.  Tolerably 
early  in  her  career  a  great  point  was  publicly  made 
against  her  by  one  of  her  critics,  Mr.  J.  Wilson  Croker, 
because  she  pretended  to  be  younger  than  she  really 
was,  and  this  was  probably  the  reason  why  she  never 
would  tell,  and  was  unwilling  that  the  little  fact  should 
be  known  after  her  death.  Lady  Morgan's  age,  brought 
into  prominence  by  the  ungallant  man  of  dates  Croker, 
who  did  not  like  her  politics, — Croker  was  the  original 
of  Rigby  in  Disraeli's  "  Coningsby," — was  a  disputed 
point  for  nearly  half  a  century.  Writing  to  the 
Athencmm  in  1859  (January  22)  apropos  of  some 
allusion  to  her  age,  the  lively  old  lady  made  the  follow- 
ing rhyme  : 
22 


284        FROM    MRS.  RADCLIFFE   TO    BULWER    LYTTON 

"  Then  talk  not  to  me  of  my  age ; 

I  appeal  from  the  phrase  to  the  fact 
That  I'm  told  in  your  own  brilliant  page 
I'm  still  young  in  fun,  fancy,  and  tact." 

She  made  her  first  appearance  as  a  novelist  in  1804 
with  "  St.  Clair,"  and  followed  this  up  with  "  The  Novice 
of  St.  Dominick"  and  "  The  Wild  Irish  Girl"  in  1806. 
According  to  her  own  account,  she  was  still  in  her  teens 
when  she  wrote  "  The  Wild  Irish  Girl,"  which  made  her 
reputation,  but  the  statistical  Croker  maintained  that 
she  was  born  in  1770.  There  is  documentary  evidence 
that  she  was  at  a  boarding-school  in  Dublin  in  1794, 
and  at  that  time  considered  herself  too  old  to  sit  on  her 
father's  knee  ;  but  certainly  twenty-four  would  be  a 
mature  age  for  a  school-girl,  so  that  Croker  was  for  once 
out  in  his  dates,  though  he  pretended  to  have  consulted 
a  register.  The  lady,  it  is  needless  to  say,  paid  the 
critic  out ;  she  made  him  sit  for  the  portrait  of  one  of 
her  most  odious,  sycophantic,  unscrupulous  political 
adventurers,  Con  Crawley  in  "  Florence  MacCarthy." 
Croker  must  have  had  a  thick  skin  if  he  felt  none  of  the 
shafts  that  were  levelled  at  him.  Macaulay  ridiculed 
him  heartily  in  his  essay  on  Boswell's  Johnson,  and 
Disraeli's  Rigby  is  one  of  the  most  cutting  of  the  satires 
of  that  master  of  the  art.  The  beginning  of  Croker's 
dislike  to  Lady  Morgan,  whom  he  attacked  with  a  viru- 
lent personality  not  uncommon  at  the  time,  but  long 
since  out  of  fashion,  was  her  politics.  She  followed 
Miss  Edgeworth  in  choosing  her  subjects  from  her  native 
country  of  Ireland  ;  but  she  was  herself  a  different  type 
of  Irishwoman  from  that  cool,  sensible,  impartially 
humorous  lady — enthusiastic,  romantic,  inordinately 
fond  of  excitement  and  social  notoriety.  She  drew 
her  ideal  of  her  own  character  in  "  The  Wild  Irish 
Girl"  Glorvina.  Two  of  her  Irish  novels, — "Florence 
MacCarthy"  (1818)  and  "The  O'Briens  and  the 
0'Flahert}rs  "  (1827), — may  still  be  read  with  interest. 


REV.  CHARLES    MATURIN  285 

The  character  of  Florence  MacCarthy  is  charming ; 
Phyllis  French,  in  a  recent  novel  by  Frank  Lee  Bene- 
dict, "  The  Price  she  Paid,"  is  an  evident  copy  of  her. 
Lady  Morgan  may  have  seen  the  original  from  which 
she  drew  in  the  earlier  part  of  her  life,  for  she  was  the 
daughter  of  an  Irish  actor,  and  had  seen  a  good  deal 
of  Bohemian  life  before  she  acquired  distinction  as  an 
authoress  and  was  taken  up  by  the  Abercorn  family, 
and  married  almost  by  stratagem  to  the  family  physician, 
Sir  Charles  Morgan. 

Another  Irish  novelist  deserves  a  word  of  mention,  if 
only  for  the  singularity  of  his  career,  the  Rev.  Charles 
Maturin,  curate  of  St.  Peter's  in  Dublin.  Maturin  had 
the  curious  fortune  to  attract  the  attention  of  some  of 
the  greatest  magnates  of  literature  in  his  time,  who  were 
struck  by  the  power  of  his  writing  and  his  conception  of 
situation  and  character,  and  believed  one  after  another 
that  it  was  possible  for  him  to  cure  himself  of  the  wild 
rhapsodical  extravagance  by  which  his  productions  were 
disfigured.  He  followed  up  Lady  Morgan's  "  Wild  Irish 
Girl  "  with  a  "  Wild  Irish  Boy,"  and  a  romance  of  his, 
"  The  Family  of  Montoria,  or,  The  Fatal  Revenge,"  fell 
into  Scott's  hands  in  1810,  and  was  reviewed  by  him 
in  the  Quarterly.  Maturin  professed  himself  entirely 
convinced  by  the  criticisms  of  his  friends,  acknowledged 
that  his  previous  works  were  failures,  and  undertook  to 
keep  himself  within  the  bounds  of  probability  in  the 
novel  of  "  Women,  or,  Pour  et  Contre."  His  heroine 
Zaira  was  a  great  artist  of  unhappy  domestic  life,  a  study 
of  the  same  kind  as  Mme.  de  Stael's  "  Corinne "  or 
George  Sand's  "  Consuelo."  It  is  not  an  uncommon 
type  in  recent  fiction  ;  Miss  Bertha  Thomas's  "Violin- 
Player"  is  a  recent  example.  Maturin  had  also  a 
tragedy,  "Bertram,"  produced  at  Drury  Lane  in  1818, 
through  the  influence  of  Lord  Byron,  which  had  the 
honor  of  being  critically  dissected  by  Coleridge.     But 


286        FROM   MRS.  RADCLIFFE    TO    BtTLWER   LYTTON 

he  never  overcame  his  tendency  to  absurd  extravagance 
of  expression  and  wild  improbability,  though  We  can 
understand  why  it  was  that  the  great  critics  of  the  time 
continued  to  hope  that  he  would  tone  down. 

Miss  Edgeworth,  Miss  Austen,  Miss  Owenson,  and 
the  wild  Irish  boy  Maturin  were  in  full  swing  when 
"  Waverley  "  appeared  in  1814,  and  was  followed  at  short 
intervals  by  a  series  of  novels  received  with  an  excite- 
ment to  which  there  is  hardly  a  parallel  in  our  litera- 
ture— no  parallel  at  all,  if  we  except  the  novels  of 
Dickens.  It  would  be  absurd  to  attempt  any  criticism 
on  the  Waverley  Novels  in  a  fragment  of  a  lecture,  and 
the  chief  facts  about  the  reception  of  them  and  the 
life  of  the  great  novelist  during  their  composition  are 
doubtless  familiar  to  you  all.  I  have  already  sketched 
for  jou  how  he  laid  the  foundation  for  his  extraordinary 
rapidity  of  production  once  he  began  to  write  novels. 
It  was  not,  strictly  speaking,  impromptu  writing,  as 
Carlyle  tauntingly  described  it ;  not  impromptu  in  the 
sense  of  being  writing  without  any  previous  prepara- 
tion ;  it  was  rapid  in  virtue  of  great  previous  enthu- 
siasm and  industry  in  the  accumulation  of  materials. 
He  could  not  in  so  short  a  space  of  time  have  painted 
the  costumes  and  manners  and  characters  of  so  many 
different  periods,  from  the  eleventh  century  to  the 
eighteenth,  in  Scotland,  in  England,  on  the  Continent, 
if  his  mind  had  not  been  full  of  them  before  he  began 
to  write,  and  that  familiarity  had  been  obtained  by 
years  of  labor  in  regions  dry  as  dust  to  all  but  the 
enthusiastic  antiquary.  Special  students  of  the  present 
day  can  point  to  a  good  many  errors  of  detail  in  Scott's 
medievalism,  though  chiefly  on  trifling  points  ;  but  we 
must  compare  his  romances  with  other  so-called  historical 
romances  before  his  time,  if  we  are  to  do  justice  to  the 
extraordinary  range  of  his  historical  knowledge,  quite 
apart  from  his  genius  in  reviving  the  life  of  the  past. 


ABEARANCE    OF    "  WAVERLEY  287 

Miss  Jane  Porter's  "Scottish  Chiefs"  was  one  of  the 
first  historical  novels  produced  in  this  century,  and  the 
lady  was  always  proud  of  Laving  set  the  example  to  Scott ; 
but  there  is  very  little  real  local  color  in  her  account 
of  the  adventures  of  Wallace  and  Bruce — there  is  hardly 
an  attempt  made  to  keep  to  historical  probability.  You 
will  find  in  the  introductions  which  he  wrote  for  his 
novels  shortly  before  his  death  an  account  of  the  actual 
incidents  that  suggested  the  various  plots ;  but  he 
would  have  had  to  go  back  over  his  life  to  his  boyhood, 
when  he  devoured  every  history  he  could  lay  his  hands 
on,  in  order  to  trace  the  origin  of  the  resources  that 
enabled  him  to  clothe  with  such  richness  of  costume  and 
incident  the  bare  skeleton  of  story  that  served  him  as 
a  starting-point.  It  would  seem  that  it  was  almost  an 
accident  that  he  did  not  begin  writing  prose  romances 
before  his  metrical  tales,  and  he  humorously  observes 
in  the  introduction  to  "  Waverley "  that  if  his  readers 
were  inclined  to  complain  of  his  fertility  in  novel-writ- 
ing, they  had  reason  to  congratulate  themselves  that  he 
was  comparatively  advanced  in  life  before  he  began. 
He  did  make  two  beginnings,  one  in  1800  and  another 
in  1805,  of  which  you  will  find  an  account  in  the  intro- 
duction to  "  Waverley";  but  he  threw  them  aside  for 
one  reason  or  another.  It  was  the  success  of  Miss  Edge- 
worth's  Irish  tales,  he  tells  us,  that  finally  determined 
him  to  try  to  do  for  the  people  and  scenery  of  Scotland 
what  she  had  done  for  Ireland. 

You  all  know  the  great  calamity  of  Scott's  life,  the 
heroic  courage  with  which  he  faced  it,  and  the  amazing 
power  with  which  he  labored  cheerfully  to  retrieve  his 
misfortune.  You  know  how  he  connected  himself  with 
the  printing  and  publishing  business  of  the  Ballantynes 
and  Constable  ;  how  in  1826,  after  earning  unexampled 
sums  bjr  his  novels,  he  found  himself  involved  in  liabili- 
ties to  the  amount  of  £170,000  ;  and  how  he  set  himself 
to  clear  off  this  enormous  load,  toiling  from  morning 


288         FROM    MRS.  RADCLIFFE    TO    BULWER    LYTTON 

till  night  till  paralysis  came  upon  him,  and  he  broke 
down  in  the  struggle,  not,  however,  till  he  had  accom- 
plished the  object  of  his  honorable  determination.  His 
ambition  had  been  very  different  in  his  prosperous  days, 
to  found  another  great  territorial  family  of  Scotts  ;  but 
he  labored  for  the  five  years  that  his  powers  lasted  with 
even  greater  energy  to  redeem  his  name  from  the 
fancied  disgrace  of  a  debt  that  was  not  of  his  own  con- 
tracting. You  know  also  that  he  did  not  avow  the 
authorship  of  the  Waverley  Novels  till  this  misfortune 
overtook  him. 

At  first  he  was  afraid  of  his  reputation  as  a  poet,  and 
afterward  he  kept  up  the  disguise  from  no  definite  reason, 
but  simply  because  he  liked  it.  He  did  not  like  to  appear 
in  society  as  a  literary  lion,  and  he  delighted  in  having 
a  secret  all  to  himself,  and  in  being  the  centre  of  a  mys- 
tery. Carlyle's  fierce  criticism  of  the  novels  was  that 
they  were  not  profitable  for  doctrine,  for  reproof,  for 
edification,  for  building  up  or  elevating  in  any  shape. 
Scott,  as  Carlyle  said,  certainly  gave  by  his  novels  im- 
mense pleasure  to  indolent  and  languid  readers,  but  he 
also  brought  all  classes  of  readers  together  by  his  sympa- 
thetic delineations  of  characters  in  humble  life.  No 
novelist  in  any  century  has  exercised  a  more  healthy  and 
beneficial  influence. 

Professor  Masson  has  collected  some  curious  statistics 
showing  the  enormous  impulse  given  to  novel-writing  by 
the  success  of  the  Waverley  Novels.  In  1820,  when  they 
were  at  the  height  of  their  popularity,  the  number  pub- 
lished, or  received  at  the  British  Museum,  was  26,  an 
average  of  1  every  fortnight.  Ten  years  later,  when 
the  series  was  nearly  finished,  in  1830,  the  number 
received  was  101,  nearly  an  average  of  2  a  week. 
And  it  would  appear  from  the  British  Museum  Cata- 
logue that  the  average  has  been  pretty  steadily  main- 
tained since.  I  doubt,  however,  whether  the  authorities 
of  the  Museum  have  always  been  careful  to  avail  them- 


CURIOUS    STATISTICS    ANENT    NOVEL-WRITING        289 

selves  of  their  rights,  for  in  several  cases,  having  occa- 
sion to  see  if  possible  the  first  editions  of  various  novels, 
I  have  found,  rather  to  my  surprise,  that  a  novel  is 
represented  there  by  an  edition  issued  years  after  its 
first  appearance. 

Among  the  host  of  novel-writers  who  made  their  first 
appearance  in  the  ten  years  after  the  date  of  "  Waverley  " 
the  three  of  most  marked  originality  and  distinction 
were  women — Miss  Ferrier,  Mrs.  Shelley,  and  Miss  Mit- 
ford.  Even  after  Scott,  Miss  Ferrier  found  something 
fresh  in  the  humorous  observation  of  Scottish  character. 
We  have  seen  how  he  compared  his  own  bow-wow  style 
with  the  more  realistic  modern  art  of  Miss  Austen,  and 
envied  her  power  of  entering  into  the  humor  of  ordi- 
nary respectable  characters.  Miss  Ferrier  had  the  gift 
which  he  lacked,  and  exercised  it  with  great  felicity  in 
her  novels  of  "  Marriage  "  and  "  The  Inheritance." 

Mrs.  Shelley,  the  daughter  of  William  Godwin,  him- 
self a  novelist  of  considerable  repute  at  the  end  of  the 
eighteenth  century,  wrote  only  one  novel,  but  the  con- 
ception was  so  original  and  unique  that  it  is  not  likely 
to  be  soon  forgotten.  This  was  "  Frankenstein."  It 
appeared  in  1818,  and  had  the  honor  of  being  reviewed 
by  Scott,  who  found  time  for  all  sorts  of  miscellaneous 
literary  work  even  when  his  greatest  novels  were  on  the 
anvil.  Mrs.  Shelley  boldly  accepted  Horace  Walpole's 
idea  of  taking  the  utmost  license  as  regarded  probability 
of  incident,  concentrating  her  power  upon  imagining 
how  her  hero  felt  and  acted  in  his  supernatural  circum- 
stances. The  hero  was  a  German  student  who  had  by 
unwearied  vigils  discovered  the  secret  of  imparting  life 
to  inanimate  matter,  and  who  constructed  a  gigantic 
monster  and  was  terribly  persecuted  by  his  own  crea- 
tion. 

Very  different  in  character  was  the  work  of  Miss  Mit- 
ford,  one  of  the  most  delightful  and  natural  and  ge- 
nially humorous  writers  in  the  language.     Her  sketches 


290    FKOM  MRS.  RADCLIFFE  TO  BULWER  LYTTON 

of  life  in  "  Our  Village,"  of  the  "  Talking  Lady,"  the 
"  Talking  Gentlemen,"  of  poachers,  seamstresses,  domes- 
tic servants,  young  men  and  old  men  of  local  note, 
remain,  after  half  a  century  of  imitations,  as  fresh  as  if 
they  had  been  written  yesterday.  No  human  being  ever 
had  a  cheerier  or  more  sympathetic  outlook  on  the 
world.  Her  sympathies,  with  a  certain  waywardness, 
turned  rather  toward  characters  that  the  respectable 
world  frowns  upon,  with  lawless,  good-hearted  charac- 
ters and  coquettish  beauties.  She  liked  to  show  the 
good  side  of  such  beings  to  the  world.  Like  Miss 
Edgeworth,  she  had  a  father,  but  a  very  different  father 
from  the  energetic,  inventive,  philanthropic,  restless 
squire  of  Edgeworthstown.  Dr.  Mitford  was  an  "awful 
dad,"  a  scapegrace  who  spent  his  wife's  fortune  in  a  few 
years,  ran  rapidly  through  a  lottery  prize  which  his  little 
girl  had  the  good  fortune  to  draw,  and  in  his  old  age 
subsisted  on  the  small  remnant  of  his  fortune  and  the 
proceeds  of  his  daughter's  literary  industry.  Yet  his 
daughter  adored  him,  and  took  infinite  delight  in  his 
"  friskings,"  as  she  called  his  little  eccentricities,  living 
in  a  small  house  that  was  a  lesson  in  condensation, 
refusing  all  holiday  invitations  from  her  wealthy  rela- 
tions, never  stopping  in  her  literary  work  except  to  read 
the  sporting  newspaper  to  the  graceless  companion  who 
called  her  his  "  mamma,"  and  was  the  stay,  support,  and 
admiration  of  all  the  loafers  in  the  neighborhood.  Miss 
Mitf ord's  early  ambition  was  to  be  "  the  greatest  Eng- 
lish poetess,"  and  when  she  was  little  more  than  twenty 
her  metrical  tales  were  praised  by  Scott  in  the  Quar- 
terly, while  some  years  later  tragedies  from  her  pen 
were  highly  successful  at  Covent  Garden.  The  short 
tales  and  sketches  collected  under  the  title  of  "  Our  Vil- 
lage "  were  written  originally  for  a  magazine,  purely  for 
the  supply  of  the  household,  and  yet  they  brought  her 
more  enduring  fame  than  her  poetry.  They  had  an  influ- 
ence on  the  early  manner  of  Dickens,  and  may  almost 


RISE    OF   THE    FASHIONABLE    NOVEL  291 

be  said  to  have  founded  a  school  of  periodical  sketch- 
writing. 

The  natural  result  of  the  interest  created  in  author- 
ship by  Scott  and  Ityron  in  fashionable  society  was  the 
rise  of  a  school  of  fashionable  novelists.  This  was  the 
chief  literary  phenomenon  of  the  last  five  years  of  the 
reign  of  George  IV.,  the  last  five  years  of  our  period. 
Of  the  fashionable  novels  then  in  fresh  repute  only  two 
are  now  much  remembered,  Disraeli's  "  Vivian  Grey  " 
and  Bulwer  Lytton's  "  Pelham."  But  there  was  a 
large  cluster  of  them,  all  with  something  of  the  same 
character,  and  that  something  new.  The  authors  were 
men  moving  in  the  society  which  they  attempted  to 
describe.  Up  to  that  time  fashionable  life  had  been 
described  by  women  ;  now  the  young  dandies, — sucking 
diplomatists,  politicians,  and  statesmen, — seized  upon  the 
novel  as  a  dramatic  vehicle  for  conveying  their  views 
on  the  manners  of  society  and  the  affairs  of  the  State. 
It  is  -an  interesting  thing  for  the  historian  to  have 
had  the  inner  life  of  political  society  so  copiously 
described  before  the  Reform  Bill,  which  produced  such 
a  change  in  the  political  power  of  the  upper  hundreds  ; 
we  have  vividly  depicted  in  the  pages  of  these  novels 
the  old  state  of  things,  and  we  are  brought  into  immedi- 
ate contact  with  the  ardent,  fiery  spirit  of  the  young 
ambitions  that  were  awakened  by  the  prospect  of  change. 
"  Vivian  Grey  "  and  "  Pelham  "  have  been  kept  alive  by 
the  subsequent  reputation  of  their  authors  ;  but  there 
were  three  other  authors  who  fairly  shared  with  them 
the  applause  of  contemporaries.  Mr.  Plumer  Ward's 
"  Tremaine,  or,  The  Man  of  Refinement,"  was  the  first 
of  the  series;  then  followed  Mr.  Lister's  "Granby"; 
then  side  by  side  Disraeli  and  Bulwer  and  Lord 
Normanby. 


CHAPTER    XIX 

SHELLEY    AND    KEATS 

SHELLEY — VARIOUS  CONCEPTIONS  OF  THE  POET — CHARACTER — 
KEATS — THE  REVIEWERS — CHARACTERISTICS  OF  HIS  POETRY — 
"  ENDYMION  "  AND   "  HYPERION  " 

The  common  judgment  of  Shelley,  at  least  as  expressed 
in  literary  organs,  has  undergone  a  complete  revolution 
since  he  was  a  living  man.  Nobody  now  would  venture 
to  publish  an  article  about  Shelley  without  copious 
protestations  of  admiration  for  the  poet,  whatever  the 
opinion  might  be  expressed  about  his  conduct  as  a  man. 
To  acknowledge  indifference  to  his  poetry  would  be 
to  set  one's  self  against  an  overwhelming  weight  of 
authoritative  opinion.  To  deny  him  equal  rank  with 
any  poet  of  his  generation  would  be  heres}'.  Enjoy- 
ment of  Shelley  is  often  put  forward  as  a  test  of  poetic 
sensibility;  if  Shelle}^  does  not  delight  you,  you  are  set 
down  as  not  being  capable  of  knowing  what  poetry  is. 
He  is  now  par  excellence  the  poet's  poet. 

But  it  was  otherwise  when  his  poems  first  appeared. 
He  received  hardly  a  word  of  cordial  recognition  from 
any  critical  organ  of  authority,  except  from  his  friend 
Leigh  Hunt's  journal,  the  Examiner.  The  potentates 
and  powers  of  criticism — the  Quarterly,  the  Edinburgh 
Revievi,  Blackwood's,  and  Literary  Gazette, — were 
unanimous  in  derision  and  denunciation.  That  such 
stuff  as  "Alastor"  and  "The  Revolt  of  Islam"  should 
pretend  to  be  poetry  was  hailed  as  one  of  the  most 
ludicrous  pretensions  in  an  age  fertile  in  ludicrous 
literary  pretensions.  It  was  a  mere  incoherent  farce 
of  meaningless    imagery,  a    collection    of   lines   pretty 

292 


VARIOUS  CONCEPTIONS  OF  SHELLEY       293 

enough  in  themselves,  but  the  most  hollow  of  empti- 
nesses; mere  sound  and  fury,  signifying  nothing.  In  so 
far  as  any  meaning  was  discernible  through  tlie  iridescent 
vapor  of  words,  the  critics  did  not  like  it.  The  poet's 
designs,  in  so  far  as  they  could  be  made  out,  were  im- 
moral, anarchic,  atheistic  ;  Avhenever  he  deviated  into 
intelligibility,  it  was  to  rave  against  all  law  and  order, 
human  and  divine,  to  rave  with  fierce,  shrill,  hysterical 
vituperation  against  all  that  other  men  held  sacred. 
There  were  reports  also,  which  the  critics  did  not  fail 
to  publicly  notice,  about  his  private  conduct  which 
accounted  for  his  mad  rebellion  against  established 
order.  It  was  said  that  he  was  a  young  man  who  had 
been  expelled  from  Oxford  for  an  atheistic  publication  ; 
that  he  had  married  a  school-girl  and  deserted  her,  with 
the  result  that  she  committed  suicide  ;  and  that  he  had 
persuaded  another  young  girl  of  sixteen  to  run  away 
with  him  while  his  first  wife  was  still  alive.  In  short, 
the  poetry  was  effeminate,  hysterical,  and  contemptible, 
in  so  far  as  it  was  not  dangerous  and  unsettling  ;  while 
the  poet  himself  was  a  disreputable  profligate  against 
whom  all  respectable  persons  should  set  their  faces. 

Such  was  the  conception  of  Shelley  which  all  readers 
of  the  leading  organs  of  public  opinion  in  his  generation 
were  invited  to  entertain.  As  far  as  his  poetry  was 
concerned,  not  a  little  of  the  animus  against  it  was  due 
to  its  strangeness,  its  novelty,  its  unlikeness  to  any  thing 
that  had  been  published  before  in  verse.  Even  if  the 
circumstances  had  been  favorable  to  its  receiving  a  fair 
judgment  as  poetry,  we  may  well  doubt  whether  on  its 
first  appearance  the  critics  would  not  have  treated  it  as 
a  flock  of  birds  might  treat  a  new-comer  in  gorgeous 
but  unfamiliar  plumage.  We  must  remember,  also,  that 
Shelley's  first  noticeable  works,  "  Alastor  "  and  "  The 
Revolt  of  Islam,"  were  deficient  in  many  of  the  great 
qualities  of  his  later  works,  and  were  justly  liable  to  the 
reproach  of  incoherent  copiousness  and  obscurity.     But 


294  SHELLEY    AND    KEATS 

there  were  accidental  circumstances  calculated  to 
strengthen  any  prejudice  that  might  be  against  Shelley's 
poetry,  based  on  its  own  intrinsic  defects  and  difficulties. 
The  literary  world  was  divided  more  sharply  than  at 
any  time  before  or  since  into  hostile  factions,  and 
provincial  and  political  enmities  were  allowed  to  bias 
literary  judgments  to  a  degree  of  flagrancy  now  almost 
incredible.  There  was  the  Edinburgh  Review  clique 
under  the  banner  of  Jeffrey,  and  the  Blackwood  clique 
under  the  banner  of  Wilson,  and  the  Quarterly  clique 
under  the  banner  of  Gifford,  and  the  Examiner  clique 
under  the  banner  of  Leigh  Hunt.  Men  like  Scott  and 
Byron,  with  their  bold,  direct,  intelligible  address  to 
the  great  body  of  readers,  swept  past  these  guardians  of 
the  gates  of  the  Temple  of  Fame  straight  to  their  des- 
tination. But  if  a  poet  was  not  easily  understood  by 
the  multitude,  if  he  needed  an  interpreter  or  a  sponsor, 
or  a  kindly  word  of  introduction,  and  had  not  friends 
in  more  than  one  camp,  praise  from  one  quarter  was 
more  than  likely  to  awaken  hostility  in  every  other. 
There  was  a  jealousy  between  Edinburgh  and  London 
of  which  any  new  aspirant  might  be  made  the  victim. 
Hard  things  were  said  in  the  London  organs  about  the 
Scottish  critics,  and  the  Scottish  critics,  proud  of  the 
renown  of  Modern  Athens,  asserted  themselves  in  violent 
denunciation  of  every  thing  Cockney.  No  words  were 
too  bitterly  contemptuous  for  the  Cockney  school  of 
poetry  ;  they  had  an  ideal  Cockney  in  their  minds, 
compounded  of  vulgarity,  bad  taste,  effusive  sentimen- 
tality, affected  prettiness,  and  they  poured  the  vials  of 
their  scornful  mockery  upon  every  poem  published  in 
London  in  which  there  was  a  suspicion  of  these  qualities. 
Then  there  was  a  political  jealousy  between  Tory,  Whig, 
and  Radical,  in  the  interests  of  which  a  new  poem  was 
sharply  scrutinized  and  cordially  welcomed  or  denounced 
according  to  the  creed  of  the  reviewer.  The  Quarterly 
and  Blackwood 's,  the  champions  of  Toryism,  and  the 


THE   VARIOUS    CLIQUES    OF    CRITICS  295 

Edinburgh,  the  champion  of  Whiggery,  had  an  almost 
equally  keen  scent  for  a  revolutionary.  Any  discontent 
with  the  established  order  of  things,  beyond  such  dis- 
content as  was  recognized  in  the  Whig  programme,  was 
sure  to  draw  down  from  the  Quarterly  and  BlaclewoocVs 
a  charge  of  Jacobinism,  atheism,  and  infidelity,  and  to 
insure  that  the  Edinburgh  should  either  join  in  the  cry 
or  pass  over  in  silence  the  work  in  which  the  dangerous 
doctrines  appeared.  The  situation  was  still  further 
complicated  by  purely  literary  factions,  factions  based 
on  difference  of  literary  creed.  By  1818  the  reverence 
for  the  traditions  of  the  eighteenth  century  had  been 
rudely  shaken  ;  but  there  were  still  among  the  critics 
a  good  many  who  shook  their  heads  over  modern  innova- 
tions and  sighed  for  the  good  old  style.  The  new 
edition  of  Pope  had  given  an  occasion  for  comparing 
the  old  with  the  new,  and  Gifford  of  the  Quarterly  was 
a  bigoted,  hard,  and  vehement  supporter  of  Pope,  ever 
ready  to  launch  out  with  all  his  energy  of  invective 
against  unexpected  novelties.  Now,  Shelley  had  the 
misfortune  to  concentrate  on  his  person  the  lightnings 
of  no  less  than  three  great  factions.  Before  he  pub- 
lished "  Alastor "  he  had  connected  himself  publicly 
with  Leigh  Hunt,  the  leader  and  founder  of  the  so-called 
Cockney  school,  so  that  Shelley,  like  Keats,  who  made 
his  first  essay  about  the  same  time,  was  regarded  as  a 
new  development  of  Cockneyism.  He  spoke  with  daring 
disrespect  of  venerable  institutions,  and  so  incurred  the 
wrath  of  all  the  literary  organs  of  respectability.  And 
in  his  method  he  departed  more  widely  than  any  previous 
poet  from  the  concise,  epigrammatic,  reasonable  style  of 
Pope,  so  that  all  who  had  leanings  in  that  direction  were 
doubly  scandalized  by  his  extravagances. 

The  fullest  expression  of  Shelley's  character  is  to  be 
found,  of  course,  in  his  poetry  ;  but  if  that  puzzles  you, 
there  is  much  that  may  be  cleared  up  by  a  reference  to 
his  letters — e.  g.,  a  selection  of  them  recently  published 


296  SHELLEY   AND   KEATS 

by  Garnett ;  "  Essays  and  Letters  from  Abroad,"  by 
Mrs.  Shelley  ;  "  Memorials  of  Shelley,"  by  Lady  Shelley  ; 
"  Records  of  Byron,  Shelley,  and  his  Contemporaries," 
by  Trelawny.  The  letters  are  masterpieces  of  expression, 
frank,  candid,  really  letters,  and  yet  so  perfect  in  style 
that  Mr.  Matthew  Arnold  expects  the  reputation  of 
them  to  be  even  more  enduring  than  his  poetry. 

The  key-note  of  Shelley's  character,  his  ruling  motive, 
was  an  excessively  sensitive  hatred  of  every  thing  in 
the  shape  of  harshness,  tyranny,  injustice,  carried  to 
extremes  that  to  an  ordinary  mind  appear  fantastic 
and  insane.  Such  sensitiveness  is  not  rare  among  men 
when  their  own  interests  are  touched,  but  Shelley's 
resentment  took  a  much  wider  range  than  a  morbid 
instinct  of  self-defence.  He  could  not  bear  the  thought 
of  the  existence  of  oppression  anywhere  under  the  sun  ; 
the  thought  of  such  a  thing  maddened  him,  and  kindled 
his  energies  to  be  up  and  doing  at  once  for  its  extinc- 
tion. In  his  youthful  vehemence  he  was  a  stranger  to 
wise  patience  and  slow,  deliberate  calculation  of  ways 
and  means  ;  and  his  action,  consequently,  was  not 
always  the  best  action  for  the  end  in  view  ;  but  such 
was  his  motive — a  violent,  furious  dislike  to  wrong- 
doing. Himself  one  of  the  gentlest  of  creatures,  play- 
ful, affectionate,  beloved  by  all  who  knew  him,  he 
was  capable,  under  this  intolerable  spur,  of  behaving 
with  the  fury  of  a  demon.  Nothing  could  be  further 
from  the  truth  than  representing  Shelley  as  inspired  by 
a  blind  hatred  of  all  law  and  order,  a  violent  assailant 
of  established  institutions  because  they  interfered  with 
the  pleasure  of  following  his  own  will,  because  they 
interposed  checks  between  him  and  the  execution  of 
wayward,  capricious,  whimsical  impulses.  It  was  the 
excesses  committed  in  the  name  of  law  and  order  that 
he  could  not  endure  ;  the  cruelties  sanctioned  by 
established  institutions  that  drove  him  into  revolt 
against  them.     Law  and  order  and  established  institu- 


SENSITIVENESS    OF   SHELLEY  297 

tions  offended  him,  not  by  their  spirit,  but  by  the  delin- 
quencies and  transgressions  of  their  accredited  ministers, 
many  of  whom,  in  the  history  of  the  world,  have 
not  merely  fallen  short  of  ideal  righteousness,  but, 
under  the  protection  of  sacred  names,  have  in  small 
things  and  in  great  committed  shameful  offences  against 
humanity.  It  was  the  defect  of  Shelley's  temperament 
that  he  was  almost  insanely  sensitive  to  harshness  and 
cruelty  of  conduct,  not  with  a  shrinking  sensitiveness, 
but  with  the  sensitiveness  that  flamed  out  in  fiery 
indignation,  the  sensitiveness  of  a  man  who  came  of 
the  high-spirited  chivalrous  race  of  the  Sidneys.  This 
spirit  was  the  ruling  principle  of  his  conduct  in  small 
things  as  well  as  in  great,  and  led  him  into  some  eccen- 
tricities that  appear  merely  ludicrous  to  the  ordinary 
mind,  and  into  one  eccentricity  which,  viewed  in  the 
light  of  its  tragic  consequences,  has  the  appearance  of 
a  scandalous  crime.  For  example,  he  would  not  drink 
tea  with  sugar,  because  sugar  was  the  produce  of 
slave-labor,  and  he  ate  nothing  but  vegetable  food, 
because  he  believed  that  man  had  no  right  to  kill  and  eat 
the  lower  animals.  When  he  was  a  boy  at  Eton,  he 
rebelled  against  the  system  of  fagging,  which  was  much 
abused  by  youthful  bullies.  To  this  he  alludes  in  the 
often-quoted  stanzas  in  the  dedication  of  his  "  Revolt  of 
Islam"  : 

"Thoughts  of  great  deeds  were  mine,  dear  Friend,  when  first 
The  clouds  which  wrap  this  world  from  youth  did  pass. 
I  do  remember  well  the  hour  which  burst 
My  spirit's  sleep  :  a  fresh  May-dawn  it  was, 
When  I  walked  forth  upon  the  glittering  grass, 
And  wept,  I  knew  not  why  ;  until  there  rose 
From  the  near  schoolroom,  voices,  that,  alas  ! 
Were  but  an  echo  from  the  world  of  woes — 
The  hard  and  grating  strife  of  tyrants  and  of  foes. 

"  And  then  I  clasped  my  hands  and  looked  around — 
But  none  was  near  to  mock  my  streaming  eyes, 


298  SHELLEY    AND   KEATS 

Which  poured  their  warm  drops  on  the  sunny  ground — 
So  without  shame  I  spake — '  I  will  be  wise, 
And  just,  and  free,  and  mild,  if  in  me  lies 
Such  power,  for  I  grow  weary  to  behold 
The  selfish  and  the  strong  still  tyrannise 
Without  reproach  or  check.'    I  then  controlled 
My  tears  ;  my  heart  grew  calm,  and  I  was  meek  and  bold." 

It  is  a  common  statement  that  Shelley  was  expelled 
from  Oxford — to  which  he  was  transferred  from  Eton  at 
the  age  of  nineteen,  in  1811 — for  publishing  a  tract  in 
defence  of  Atheism.  But  this  would  appear  to  be  not 
strictly  correct.  What  he  did  was  to  issue  a  tract  con- 
taining certain  propositions  maintained  by  Atheists,  and 
to  invite  the  Heads  of  College  in  Oxford  to  answer 
them,  an  invitation  which  they  met,  as  De  Quincey  puts 
it,  by  "inviting  "  the  unpractical  enthusiast  to  withdraw 
from  the  University.  Undoubtedly  the  great  stain 
upon  Shelley's  life  is  his  treatment  of  his  first  wife, 
Harriet  Westbrook.  There  are  papers  in  the  hands  of 
the  Shelley  family  that  have  not  yet  been  published,  but 
which  are  said  to  reconcile  his  behavior  with  the  high 
and  honorable  spirit  that  he  showed  in  all  other  circum- 
stances. This  much  is  already  clear,  that  it  was  his 
chivalrous  generosity  that  first  connected  him  with  the 
girl  whose  subsequent  fate  was  so  tragic. 

Those  who  seek  to  defend  Shelley's  conduct  to  his 
wife  on  the  ground  that  he  was  an  ethereal,  impulsive 
creature,  a  visionary  child  too  much  wrapped  up  in  his 
visions  to  be  fit  for  ordinary  human  duties  or  to  be 
judged  by  any  ordinary  standard  of  right  and  wrong,  a 
being  so  good,  so  gentle,  yet  so  fragile  and  so  childishly 
eccentric  in  his  impulses,  that  the  heart  shrinks  from 
holding  him  responsible  for  the  harmful  consequences  of 
impulses  so  devoid  of  malicious  intention,  and  judg- 
ment is  suspended  in  wondering  pity — such  defenders 
do  great  injustice  to  the  fundamental  strength  of  the 
poet's  character,  and  interpose  an  obstacle  to  the  under- 


Shelley's  view  of  life  299 

standing  of  his  greater  poems.  He  was  a  visionary, 
indeed,  but  not  an  aimless  and  drifting  visionary  ;  the 
dreamer's  eyes  were  fixed  steadily,  constantly  upon  one 
vision,  the  struggle  between  good  and  evil  in  the 
world,  the  vicissitudes  of  this  struggle,  and  the  final 
triumph  of  good.  He  read  history  ;  he  observed  life  ; 
but  wherever  he  turned  his  eyes,  all  the  actions  of  man- 
kind presented  themselves  as  moves  in  the  terrible 
game  between  these  opposing  principles.  The  centre 
of  interest  for  him  in  the  world-drama  Avas  the  pro- 
tracted duel  between  good  and  evil.  This  view  of  life 
was  natural  in  a  generation  perplexed  and  disturbed  by 
the  staggering  events  of  the  French  Revolution  and  the 
world-wide  ambition  of  Napoleon.  The  great  problems 
of  human  destiny  were  forced  upon  all  the  reflective 
minds  of  the  time,  and  Shelley's  nature  was  not  merely 
profoundly  meditative,  but  deeply  interested  in  the  issue, 
and  passionately  eager  for  a  solution.  A  knowledge  of 
his  character  and  of  his  view  of  life  is  indispensable  to 
the  understanding  of  such  poems  as  "  Alastor,"  and 
"  The  Revolt  of  Islam,"  and  "  Prometheus  Unbound." 
Without  this  simple  key,  they  must  alwaj^s  appear 
meaningless  rhapsodies,  incoherent  mazes  of  sweet 
sound  and  beautiful  imagery,  without  beginning,  middle, 
or  end,  capricious  ethereal  movements  of  fancy  and 
imagination  leading  nowhere.  You  cannot  open  their 
pages  anywhere  without  being  enchanted  with  the 
wonderful  melody  and  affluence  of  imagery,  of  which 
critics  labor  in  vain  to  give  any  idea  by  piling  up  all 
the  epithets  that  belong  to  whatever  is  most  charming 
in  poetic  creation.  But  this  wonderful  procession  of 
forms  to  the  music  of  most  melodious  verse  is  not  so 
aimless  as  it  appears  at  first  to  the  dazzled  senses  ;  it 
has  a  meaning  and  a  direction  even  in  its  most  seemingly 
capricious  movements.  The  poet  does  not  address  the 
senses,  but  the  understanding  heart.     Concerning  "The 

Revolt  of  Islam,"  Shelley  himself  said,  in  answer  to  a 
23 


300  SHELLEY    AND    KEATS 

letter  from  bis  friend  Godwin  censuring  its  exuberance  : 
"Tbe  poem  was  produced  by  a  series  of  tbougbts  wbicb 
filled  my  mind  witb  unbounded  and  sustained  enthu- 
siasm. I  felt  tbe  precariousness  of  my  life,  and  I 
resolved  in  this  book  to  leave  some  records  of  myself. 
Much  of  what  tbe  volume  contains  was  written  with  tbe 
same  feeling,  as  real  though  not  so  prophetic,  as  the 
communications  of  a  dying  man.  .  .  I  felt  that  it 
was  in  many  respects  a  genuine  picture  of  my  own 
mind.  I  felt  that  the  sentiments  were  true,  not 
assumed  ;  and  in  this  I  have  long  believed — that  my 
power  consists  in  sympathy,  and  that  part  of  imagina- 
tion which  relates  to  sentiment  and  contemplation." 

Tbe  lofty  strain  in  which  "  Alastor  "  opens  gives  us 
an  idea  of  the  intense  passion  with  which  he  composed 
his  poetry : 

"  Earth,  ocean,  air,  beloved  brotherhood  ! 
If  our  great  Mother  has  imbued  my  soul 
With  aught  of  natural  piety  to  feel 
Your  love,  and  recompense  the  boon  witli  mine  ; 
If  dewy  morn,  and  odorous  noon,  and  even, 
With  sunset  and  its  gorgeous  ministers, 
And  solemn  midnight's  tingling  silentness  ; 
If  autumn's  hollow  sighs  in  the  sere  wood, 
And  winter  robing  with  pure  snow  and  crowns 
Of  starry  ice  the  grey  grass  and  bare  boughs  ; 
If  spring's  voluptuous  pantings  when  she  breathes 
Her  first  sweet  kisses,  have  been  dear  to  me  ; 
If  no  bright  bird,  insect,  or  gentle  beast 
I  consciously  have  injured,  but  still  loved 
And  cherished  these  my  kindred  ; — then  forgive 
This  boast,  beloved  brethren,  and  withdraw 
No  portion  of  your  wonted  favour  now  !  " 

The  poem,  in  short,  is  an  allegory.  Like  all  intricate 
allegories,  it  is  difficult  to  interpret,  and  the  difficulty  is 
increased  by  the  fact  that  the  allegory  is  not,  as  in  the 
case  of  Spenser's  "  Faery  Queen  "  or  Tennyson's  "  Idylls" 
a  separate  stream  of  story,  complete  and  intelligible  in 


"stanzas  written  in  dejection"  301 

itself,  but  a  stream  that  is  often  interposed  with  the 
realities  that  it  is  intended  to  represent.  Its  full  inter- 
pretation in  every  particular  is  perhaps  impossible, 
because  the  poet  was  intent  only  upon  the  expression  of 
his  own  thought  and  feeling,  and  to  understand  every 
turn  of  this  we  should  have  to  read  the  histories  that  he 
read,  see  the  sights  that  he  saw,  and  track  him  through 
his  study  of  the  speculations  of  his  time  ;  but  the  general 
drift  of  the  allegory  is  obvious  enough,  if  we  only  recog- 
nize it  as  a  vision  of  the  vicissitudes  of  the  struggle 
between  good  and  evil,  in  which  sometimes  the  apparent 
triumphs  of  good  become  the  most  terrible  instruments 
of  evil,  and  sometimes  the  triumphs  of  evil  become  benefi- 
cent instruments  of  good,  while  in  the  end  the  principle 
of  good  is  victorious.  "Alastor,"  "The  Revolt  of 
Islam,"  and  "  Prometheus  "  are  all  poetic  embodiments 
of  the  same  view  of  the  history  of  man  and  the  same 
ardent  hopes  for  his  future.  I  would  remind  you  again 
of  the  Wordsworthian  theory  of  poetry  as  the  spon- 
taneous overflow  of  powerful  feelings,  and  of  what  I 
said  as  to  the  height  and  intricacy  of  the  structure  that 
the  imagination  may  raise  at  the  original  bidding  of  the 
simplest  of  emotional  motives.  If  Ityron  interpreted 
Wordsworth  to  the  multitude,  Shelley  may  be  said  to 
have  interpreted  him  to  those  who  make  poetry  a 
study. 

Among  his  shorter  poems  you  will  find  some  of  the 
most  exquisite  poetry  in  the  language,  the  "  Ode  to  the 
West  Wind,"  for  example,  being  held  by  many  to  be 
the  finest  English  lyric.  The  "  Stanzas  written  in 
Dejection  "  might  be  cited  as  another  example,  the 
concluding  lines  of  which  are  exquisitely  beautiful 
and   pathetic  : 

"  Alas  !  I  have  nor  hope,  nor  health. 
Nor  peace  within,  nor  calm  around, 
Nor  that  content,  surpassing  wealth, 
The  sage  in  meditation  found, 


302  SHELLEY   AND    KEATS 

Aud  walked  with  inward  glory  crowned — 
Nor  fame,  nor  power,  nor  love,  nor  leisure. 
Others  I  see  whom  these  surround — 
Smiling  they  live  and  call  life  pleasure  ; 
To  me  that  cup  has  been  dealt  in  another  measure. 

"  Yet  now  despair  itself  is  mild, 
Even  as  the  winds  and  waters  are  ; 
I  could  lie  down  like  a  tired  child, 
And  weep  away  the  life  of  care 
Which  I  have  borne  and  yet  must  bear, 
Till  death  like  sleep  might  steal  on  me, 
And  I  might  feel  in  the  warm  air 
My  cheek  grow  cold,  and  hear  the  sea 
Breathe  o'er  my  dying  brain  its  last  monotony. 

"  Some  might  lament  that  I  were  cold, 
As  I,  when  this  sweet  day  is  gone, 
Which  my  lost  heart,  too  soon  grown  old, 
Insults  with  this  untimely  moan  ; 
They  might  lament — for  I  am  one 
Whom  men  love  not — and  yet  regret, 
Unlike  this  day,  which,  when  the  sun 
Shall  on  its  stainless  glory  set, 
Will  linger,  though  enjoyed,  like  joy  in  memory  yet." 

You  need  not  be  frightened  by  occasional  passages  in 
Shelley's  poetry  of  denunciation  of  things  you  admire. 
No  true  Christian  need  fear  to  read  Shelley.  He  did 
not  denounce  the  spirit  of  Christianity,  but  excesses 
committed  in  the  course  of  the  histoiy  of  the  Church 
and  its  connection  with  political  creeds. 

Shelley  died  young,  before  be  bad  completed  bis 
thirtieth  year  ;  but  Keats,  who  wras  three  years  bis 
junior,  died  before  him.  The  belief  fixed  in  the  public 
mind  by  Byron's  line  : 

*'  John  Keats,  who  was  cut  off  by  one  critique" — 

is  only  a  half  truth,  if  it  is  any  portion  of  the  truth  at 
all.  The  disease  to  wThich  be  succumbed,  pulmonary 
consumption,  would  probably  have  cut  him  off  at  an 


CRITICISM    OF    KEATS  303 

early  age,  whatever  the  reception   of  his  poetry  had 
been.     Unfriendly  criticism  at  the  utmost  only  hastened 
his   end.      Certainly   the    criticism    was   very   savage. 
Keats  suffered  from  the  same  accidents  in  the  literary 
situation  as  Shelley  ;  he  was  a  friend  of  Hunt's,  and  a 
Cockney,  and  a  rebel  against  the  traditions  of  Pope, 
and  these  facts  intensified  the  bitterness  of  the    Quar- 
terly and  Blackwood's.     And  his  assailants  had  a  taunt 
to  level  at  him  such  as  the}'  could  not  use  against  the 
son  of  a  baronet,  connected  by  blood  with  some  of  the 
oldest  noble  families  in  England  ;  "Johnny  "  Keats,  as 
BlackwoocVs  delighted  to  call  him,  had  been  a  surgeon's 
apprentice,  and  was  the  son  of  a  livery-stable  keeper. 
Keats  had  too  much    manliness  in    him   to    have  been 
much  affected  by  the  truculence  of  his  critics  if  he  had 
been  a  self-satisfied  poet.     But  the  effect  was  aggra- 
vated not  only  by  ill   health  and  pecuniary  embarrass- 
ments, but  by  his  profound  dissatisfaction  with  his  own 
work.     He  said  himself,  and  with  every  appearance  of 
sincerity,  that  a  sense  of  his  shortcomings  from  the  high 
ideal  that  he  had  set  to  himself  gave  him  "  pain  without 
comparison  beyond  what  Blackwood  or  the  Quarterly 
could  possibly  inflict."     "  I  have  no  cause  to  complain," 
he   wrote.     "I  have   no  doubt   that   if  I  had    written 
'Othello 'I  should  have  been  cheered.     I  shall  go  on 
with    patience.    .    .    I    know    nothing ;    I    have    read 
nothing ;  and  I  mean   to  follow  Solomon's  directions, 
'get  learning,   get  understanding.'     There  is   but  one 
way  forme.     The  road  lies  through  application,  study, 
and  thought.     I  will  pursue  it."     These  were  the  words 
of   a   young  man  of  a  very  different   fibre   from   the 
affected,   mawkish,   puling   sentimentalist  pictured   by 
the  critics  of  the  time  as  the  author  of  "Endymion." 
Keats  had  but  a  short  lease  of  life  before  him  when  he 
wrote  thus,  but  to   the  last   he  pursued   earnestly  his 
ideals  of   excellence,  and    the  world   has  arrived    at  a 
very  different  measure  of  the  worth  of  his  performance 


304  SHELLEY    AND    KEATS 

from  that  formed  by  himself  on  his  death-bed,  when  he 
told  his  friend  Severn  to  put  on  his  gravestone  the 
inscription  :  "  Here  lies  one  ichose  name  was  writ  in 
zcater." 

Keats  is  often  coupled  with  Shelley  as  if  they  were 
poets  of  kindred  genius.  But  the  connection  between 
them  Avas  purely  accidental  ;  beyond  a  certain  profusion 
and  fluency  and  richness  of  imagery  they  had  little  in 
common,  as  little  as  any  two  poets  of  the  same  genera- 
tion. They  both  died  3'oung.  They  both  died  in  Italy, 
and  their  monuments  stand  in  the  same  cemetery  at 
Rome.  Both  of  them  were  cut  off  Avith  much  unful- 
filled promise  of  great  things.  When  Shell's  body 
Avas  recovered,  a  copy  of  Keats's  "Endymion"  Avas 
found  in  his  pocket.  One  of  Shelley's  few  popular 
poems  is  the  lament  for  Keats  under  the  pastoral  name 
of  Adonais.  These  facts  have  associated  the  two  poets 
in  the  general  memory.  But  their  aims  in  art  were 
Avidely  different.  Keats  had  none  of  Shelley's  fiery 
enthusiasm  for  humanity,  and,  although  he  had  an  ample 
share  of  the  poet's  peculiar  gift  of  making  neAv  combi- 
nations, his  combinations  are  more  sensuous  ;  they  have 
not  the  subtle  intellectual  flavor  of  Shelley's.  A  j:>oet 
of  high  rank  is  always  his  own  best  critic,  and  just  as 
Shelley  most  truly  characterized  himself  Avhen  he  said 
that  "  his  power  consisted  in  sympathy  and  that  part 
of  imagination  Avhich  relates  to  sentiment  and  con- 
templation," so  Keats  most  truly  characterized  himself 
Avhen  he  said  that  his  ruling  principle  Avas  "  a  yearning 
passion  for  the  beautiful."  "  I  have  loved  the  principle 
of  beauty  in  all  things,"  he  Avrote  in  his  last  days.  I 
am  inclined  to  think  that  Mr.  MattheAV  Arnold,  a  critic 
with  whose  judgments  I  rarely  find  myself  in  dissent, 
makes  a  someAvhat  misleading  remark  when  he  insists 
that  Keats's  master  passion  was  not  the  passion  of  the 
sensuous  or  sentimental  poet,  but  was  an  intellectual  or 
spiritual  passion.     If  the  Avords  sensuous  and  sentimental 


PECULIARITY    OF    KEATS'S   POETRY  305 

were  intended  in  an  opprobrious  sense,  the  remark 
might  be  useful  ;  but  if  they  are  used  in  the  literal 
meaning,  and  then  contrasted  with  intellectual  and 
spiritual,  their  tendency  is  to  withdraw  the  reader  of 
Keats  from  the  main  characteristics  of  his  poetry.  The 
beauty  that  Keats  pursued,  whether  or  not  we  call  that 
beauty  "  truth,"  was  loveliness 

"  In  shape  and  hue  and  colour  and  sweet  sound," — 

to  use  the  words  of  Shelley  in  the  "  Adonais."  I  imagine 
that  Mr.  Arnold's  intention  in  drawing  the  distinction 
that  I  have  quoted  was  to  lay  stress  on  the  fact  that 
the  loveliness  on  which  Keats's  heart  was  set  was  not  a 
meretricious  loveliness,  but  a  loveliness  that  was  great 
and  noble  and  pure.  Still  it  was  a  sensuous  loveliness 
in  this  meaning,  that  more  than  any  other  poet  he  aimed 
at  and  succeeded  in  depicting  in  words  the  beauty  that 
painters  put  on  canvas  and  sculptors  chisel  in  marble. 
It  is  peculiarly  easy  to  trace  the  main  external  influences 
that  moulded  Keats's  poetry,  because  all  his  woi*k  was 
done  in  youth,  when  the  enthusiastic  admirations  of  the 
artist  are  most  marked  in  endeavors  to  emulate  what 
he  admires.  And  it  is  a  marked  peculiarity  of  Keats's 
poetry  that  its  most  vital  moulding  influences  came  not 
from  the  work  of  previous  poets,  but  from  the  sister 
arts  of  painting  and  sculpture.  Impassioned  admiration 
of  Greek  sculpture  gave  a  more  potent  turn  to  Keats's 
poetry  than  any  other  external  influence.  Byron  recog- 
nized this  when  he  spoke  of  him  as  having 

' '  without  Greek 
Contrived  to  talk  about  the  gods  of  late 
Much  as  they  might  have  been  supposed  to  speak." 

We  see  this  influence  not  merely  in  his  famous  "  Ode 
on  a  Grecian  Urn,"  where  he  deliberately  seeks  to  in- 
terpret in  words  what  the  artist  had  sought  to  design 


306  SHELLEY   AND   KEATS 

in  visible  lines,  but  all  through  his  poems — in  "  Endy= 
mion,"  in  "  Hyperion,"  in  the  "  Eve  of  St.  Agnes,"  in 
"Lamia,"  in  "Isabella."  If  we  wonder  what  the  sur- 
geon's apprentice  at  Ealing  could  have  known  about 
Greek  sculpture  and  ceramic  art,  we  must  remember 
that  the  Elgin  Marbles  were  brought  to  this  country 
and  deposited  at  the  British  Museum  when  he  was  a 
boy.  You  know  Byron's  denunciation  of  the  nobleman, 
with  heart  cold  as  the  crags  that  guard  his  native  coast, 
who  had  the  shameless  rapacity  to  plunder  Athens  of 
these  masterpieces  ;  but,  looking  impartially  at  the  act 
and  its  results,  we  recognize  that  they  have  had  a  much 
more  vital  and  suggestive  influence  on  the  mind  of 
Europe  in  London  than  they  would  have  had  in  Athens, 
and  they  have  given  us  much  of  what  is  most  precious 
in  the  poetry  of  Keats.  One  of  Keats's  friends  was  the 
painter  Haydon,  who  records  in  his  autobiography  the 
intoxicating  effect  produced  on  him  by  his  first  sight  of 
Greek  sculpture.  "  Endymion  "  and  "  Hyperion  "  make 
it  certain  that  Keats  shared  his  friend's  enthusiasm. 
Let  the  meaning  sink  into  the  mind,  and  you  will  see  a 
succession  of  pictures  executed  in  the  spirit  of  Greek 
plastic  art.  In  "  Endymion  "  Keats  seems  always  to 
have  had  a  succession  of  pictures  and  sculptures  before 
his  mind's  eye,  and  his  poetry  seems  to  be  the  interpre- 
tation of  the  impression  he  receives.  The  opening  of 
"  Hyperion," — and  also  some  of  his  other  poems,  such 
as  the  "  Ode  to  the  Nightingale "  and  "  The  Eve  of 
St.  Agnes," — is  like  the  description  of  a  statue,  with  the 
repose  and  stillness  of  Greek  sculpture,  which  is  not  a 
dead  stillness,  but  motion  instantaneously  arrested. 


SUPPLEMENT 


ME.  COURTHOPE's   BIOGRAPHY    OF   POPE 

It  is  thirty-five  years,  as  every  reviewer  has  remarked, 
since  the  edition  undertaken  by  John  Wilson  Croker 
and  now  completed  by  Mr.  Courthope  was  announced ; 
but  the  real  beginning  of  the  work  that  Mr.  Courthope 
brings  to  a  close  may  be  said  to  date  from  the  papers  by 
Mr.  Dilke,  of  which  that  announcement  was  the  text. 
Mr.  Dilke's  discovery  of  the  Caryll  letters  may  be  said 
to  have  opened  a  new  chajjter  in  the  history  of  Pope's 
reputation.  By  this  lucky  find,  followed  up  with  amaz- 
ing acuteness  and  patience,  Mr.  Dilke  was  able  to  clear 
up  several  incidents  which  had  baffled  all  previous 
biographers  ;  and  his  success  and  the  piquancy  of  his 
discoveries  gave  an  immense  stimulus  to  research  into 
the  obscure  particulars  of  Pope's  life  and  the  obscure 
allusions  in  his  poetry.  Pope's  marvellous  intellectual 
activity  and  ingenuity,  and  his  persistent  habit  of  mysti- 
fication in  every  thing  relating  to  himself,  made  his  life 
and  works  the  best  possible  field  for  the  exercise  of 
detective  skill.  By  all  this  the  edition  now  completed 
has  profited.  But  for  Mr.  Dilke's  researches,  and  the 
impulse  they  gave  to  investigation,  it  could  never  have 
been  what  it  has  become.  Mr.  Elwin,  Mr.  Courthope's 
predecessor,  made  the  most  ample  acknowledgment  of 
his  debt  to  this  enthusiastic  volunteer  from  the  outside  ; 
and  now  one  of  the  main  interests  of  the  biography 
which  it  has  fallen  to  Mr.  Courthope  to  execute  is  to  see 

307 


308  SUPPLEMENT 

how  he  views  Pope's  character  under  the  fierce  light  that 
has  been  thrown  upon  it.  The  new  biographer  is  in  the 
position  of  a  judge  hearing  an  important  case  reopened 
after  the  discovery  and  production  of  a  vast  and  intri- 
cate mass  of  fresh  evidence. 

The  importance  of  Mr.  Courthope's  decision  is  con- 
siderable. The  completeness  of  the  new  edition  must 
make  it  the  standard  for  a  good  while  to  come,  and  the 
accompanying  biography  has  thus  a  position  of  great 
advantage  for  influencing  the  general  judgment  of 
Pope's  character.  It  is  just  as  well  that  the  biography 
should  have  been  delayed  till  the  disturbing  effects  of 
the  new  discoveries  had  passed  away,  and  that  the  task 
of  judicially  weighing  and  summing  up  should  have 
fallen  to  one  whose  judgment  has  not  been  biassed  by 
the  first  shock  of  damaging  revelations,  and  whose 
temper  has  not  been  exasperated  by  the  worry  of  track- 
ing the  man  of  many  mysteries  through  the  perplexing 
details  of  his  subtle  little  plots  and  manoeuvres.  It  is 
just  as  well  that  Mr.  Elwin's  place  was  taken  by  Mr. 
Courthope  before  the  stage  of  passing  final  judgment 
was  reached.  Mr.  El  win  had  great  merits  as  a  critic  ; 
it  would  be  most  unjust  not  to  acknowledge  the  excel- 
lence of  his  editorial  work.  He  spared  no  pains  in 
research  ;  he  passed  over  no  difficulty  ;  and  he  took  as 
much  trouble  to  make  his  statements  clear  and  concise 
as  he  did  to  make  his  information  accurate.  In  his  notes 
and  introductions  he  gave  a  very  fair  and  full  represen- 
tation of  the  commentaries  of  previous  authorities.  His 
own  judgments  on  critical  points  were,  perhaps,  too 
uniformly  hostile  and  unsympathetic  ;  but  they  could 
never  be  accused  of  haste,  and  they  were  always  backed 
by  well-considered  and  clearly  expi-essed  reasons.  Per- 
haps an  unfair  impression  of  his  want  of  sympathy  was 
given  by  his  having  to  deal  chiefiV  with  Pope's  earlier 
and  more  imperfect  work  ;  when  he  did  admire,  as  in 
the  case  of  "  The  Rape  of  the  Lock,"  he  expressed  his 


MR.  COURTUOPE'S    BIOGRAPHY    OF    POPE  309 

admiration  ungrudgingly.  But  in  all  that  concerned  the 
moral  character  of  his  subject  Mr.  Elwin  wrote  too  much 
as  a  righteously  indignant  avenger,  as  one  who  had  been 
disgusted  by  the  discoveries  of  Pope's  double-dealings, 
and  whose  anger  had  been  kept  alive  by  having  to  track 
his  tortuous  courses  through  so  many  perplexing  circum- 
stances. Pope  had  endeavored  to  pass  off  a  sophisti- 
cated correspondence  as  genuine,  and  the  interests  of 
truth  demanded  that  the  deception  should  be  exposed. 
"I  do  not  pretend  to  think,"  Mr.  Elwin  said,  "that 
genius  is  an  extenuation  of  rascality  ;  "  and  it  was  as  a 
rascal,  a  detected  and  discredited  impostor,  a  gentleman 
who  had  stooped  to  the  arts  of  a  professional  forger  and 
swindler,  that  he  pursued  the  poet  through  all  his  deal- 
ings with  friends  and  enemies,  publications  and  pub- 
lishers. Pope  cannot  protest  his  good-will  to  an  ac- 
quaintance in  the  exaggerated  fashion  of  his  time  without 
drawing  down  upon  himself  the  comment  :  "  At  the  age 
of  twenty,  when  frankness  usually  preponderates,  Pope 
already  abounded  in  the  ostentatious  profession  of  senti- 
ments he  did  not  entertain."  In  the  same  letter  Pope 
professes  indifference  to  fame — a  not  uncommon  profes- 
sion, and  one  not  often  taken  too  seriously  by  the  dis- 
cerning. "  In  spite  of  his  boasted  apathy,"  Mr.  Elwin 
comments,  "  there  cannot  be  found  in  the  annals  of  the 
irritable  race  a  more  anxious,  jealous,  intriguing  candi- 
date for  fame."  And  so  on.  One  tires  of  it  after  a  time, 
and  begins  to  doubt  whether  it  is  generous,  or  even  just, 
or  at  all  proportioned  to  the  offence. 

No  doubt  when  an  intriguer  is  found  out,  it  is  well 
to  make  an  example  of  him  £>our  encourager  les  autres. 
But  Mr.  Elwin  carries  it  too  far  in  the  case  of  Pope. 
He  strikes  a  note  of  excess,  and  a  misleading  note,  when 
he  speaks  of  Pope  as  "  an  intriguing  candidate  for 
fame."  The  intrigues  in  which  Pope  has  been  detected 
do  not  belong  to  the  time  when  he  can  properly  be  said 
to  have  been  a  candidate  for  fame  ;  they  were  engaged 


310  SUPPLEMENT 

in  long  after  his  fame  was  established,  partly  to  humili- 
ate his  enemies,  and  partly  to  gain  credit  for  a  universal 
benevolence  and  lofty  equanimity  of  soul  wbich  he  did 
not  possess.     He  gained  his  fame  originally  by  honest 
means  enough,  purely  on   his  merits,  in    spite   of   the 
considerable   disadvantages  of   obscure   parentage  and 
unpopular  religion.     Rascality  and   swindling  are  not 
excused  by  genius  ;  deception  is  deception,  and  perfidy 
is  perfidy.     But  what  Mr.  El  win  seemed  to  forget  was 
that  there  are  degrees  of  moral  turpitude.     One  may 
hold  this  without  incurring  any  suspicion  of  Jesuitical 
ethics.     Our  righteous  indignation  does  not  rise  to  the 
same  height  against  all  offences  that  may  be  put  in  the 
same   general   category.     Falsehood   is   falsehood,  but 
there  are  degrees.     A  man  who  tries  to  swindle  the 
world  out  of  its  good  opinion,  to  make  people  believe 
him   full    of    "the    unclouded    effulgence    of   universal 
benevolence  and  particular  fondness,"  with  no  motive 
but  sheer  vanity  and  inordinate  love  of  applause,  can- 
not  without  violence  to  common-sense  be  put  on  the 
same  moral  level  with  the  professional  forger.     Nine 
people  out  of  ten  who  read  the  full  narrative  of  Pope's 
frauds  are  more  disposed  to  laugh  at  the  ingenuity  and 
fatuity  of  his  tricks  than  to  denounce  them  in  angry 
reprobation.     They  are  inexcusable  and  disgraceful,  but 
taken  in  all  their  circumstances,  as  incidents  in  the  life 
of  a  man  otherwise  memorable,  they  are  nearer  pecca- 
dilloes than  crimes.     A  year  or  two  ago,  in  writing  a 
short   sketch    of    Pope's  life    for    an    encyclopaedia,    I 
hazarded  the  opinion  that,  Avhen  all  the  new  revelations 
of  Pope's  intriguing    habits    are    fairly    weighed,   his 
character  remains  where  Johnson  left  it,  neither  better 
nor  worse.     "  In  all  this,"  Johnson  remarks  of  one  of 
Pope's  manoeuvres  about  "  The  Dunciad,"  "  there  was 
petulance  and   malignity  enough,  but  I  cannot  think  it 
very   criminal."      The    remark    might   be   extended   to 
most  of  the  fresh  instances  of  double-dealing.     In  judg- 


MR.  COURTHOPE's    BIOGRAPHY    OP    POPE  311 

\ 

ing  of  tliem  it  is  well  to  bear  in  mind  the  maxim  which 
the  great  moralist  quoted  as  one  "that  cannot  be 
denied,"  that  "  moral  obliquity  is  made  more  or  less 
excusable  by  the  motives  that  produce  it."  It  is  satis- 
factory to  find  that  Mr.  Courthope  approaches  Pope  in 
the  spirit  of  Johnson  rather  than  of  Mr.  El  win. 

Mr.  Courthope  does  not  try  to  extenuate  or  explain 
away  Pope's  moral  delinquencies,  but  to  put  them  in 
their  proper  place  as  parts  of  a  very  complex  character. 
The  result  is  that  he  brings  us  back  to  a  judgment  of 
Pope's  moral  character  not  substantially  different  from 
Johnson's.  The  space  occupied  by  Mr.  Dilke  and  Mr. 
Elwin  in  tracing  with  so  much  acumen  the  poet's 
mysterious  ways,  and  the  startling  character  of  their 
revelations,  have  overloaded  one  side  of  the  portrait, 
and  Mr.  Courthope  has  been  at  pains  to  restore  the  right 
proportion.  His  judicial  deliverance  will  carry  none  the 
less  weight  that  all  the  time  he  is  adducing  extenuating 
circumstances  he  protests  that  he  has  no  intention  of 
excusing  or  extenuating  Pope's  misdoings,  and  that 
"  from  the  moralist's  point  of  view  the  case  must  go 
undefended."  The  apparent  inconsistency  is  only 
superficial  ;  it  is  merely  a  nice  question  of  naming. 
Mr.  Courthope  is  quite  right  to  say  that  he  does  not 
excuse  or  extenuate  or  defend  from  a  moral  point  of 
view,  if  he  thinks  that  the  use  of  such  expressions 
would  imply  that  we  ought  to  approve  in  Pope's  case  of 
conduct  mean  and  contemptible  in  itself  and  unworthy 
of  his  fame.  We  need  not  quarrel  about  words,  if  a 
biographer  observes  just  proportions  in  his  general 
estimate  of  the  man's  moral  nature  as  a  whole,  and  if 
he  allows  due  weight  to  considerations  that  prevent 
us  from  classing  Pope  morally  with  "professional 
swindlers"  and  '"dirty  animals' like  Joseph  Surface." 
This  Mr.  Courthope  does  with  great  ability  and  fair- 
ness. Throughout  the  biography  he  gives  prominence 
to  the  ideal  and  magnanimous  strain  in  Pope's  character 


312  SUPPLEMENT 

as  shown  both  in  his  private  life  and  in  his  writings. 
Since  the  recent  discoveries  were  made,  Johnson  has 
often  been  laughed  at  for  speaking  of  "  the  perpetual 
and  unclouded  effulgence  of  universal  benevolence  and 
particular  fondness "  that  shines  out  in  Pope's  letters. 
It  has  been  assumed  that  all  this  was  mere  hypocrisy 
and  pretence,  because  some  of  it  was  put  in  when  he 
revised  and  redirected  his  correspondence,  and  that 
there  was  no  such  element  as  benevolence  in  the  malign 
little  poet's  disposition.  Mr.  Courthope  corrects  this. 
His  narrative  gives  fair  prominence  to  the  instances  of 
kindly  generosity  to  dependents  and  affectionate  attach- 
ment to  friends  with  which  Pope's  life  abounds.  The 
new  letters  in  the  correspondence,  the  letters  that  were 
not  prepared  for  the  public  eye,  are  not  all  to  Pope's 
discredit.  Though  he  did  alienate  Bolingbroke  by  an 
inexplicable  trick, — it  was,  after  all,  a  little  trick, — he 
kept  the  love  of  most  of  his  friends,  and  Arbuthnot,  a 
shrewd  judge  of  men,  credited  him  with  "  a  noble  dis- 
dain and  abhorrence  of  vice."  And  whatever  casuistry 
may  be  applied  to  the  incidents  of  his  life,  it  is  not  to 
be  denied  that  the  moral  standard  of  his  Satires  as  a 
whole  is  high.  His  praise  of  the  Man  of  Ross,  of 
Bathurst,  of  Allen,  and  of  Barnard  the  Quaker  must 
be  set  over  against  Sappho  and  Atossa,  Sporus  aud 
Atticus  ;  there  is  no  good  reason  to  suppose  that  his 
admiration  of  the  one  was  less  sincere  than  his  hatred 
of  the  other.  Mr.  Courthope  seems  to  me  to  fairly 
establish  his  contention  that  Pope  was  naturally  of 
an  ardent,  generous,  and  romantic  temper,  and  that  this 
strain  was  never  wholly  lost  amid  the  bitter  quarrels 
in  which  his  later  life  was  involved. 

A  generous  warmth  of  temperament,  craving  for 
affection  as  well  as  admiration,  craving  for  both  in- 
tensely as  necessities  of  a  very  fragile  constitution,  and 
apt  to  intemperate  vindictiveness  when  they  were  with- 
held—this was  the  basis  of  Pope's  nature.     His  moral 


me.  couetiiope's  biogeaphy  op  pope  313 

delinquencies  are  not  put  in  a  fair  light  unless  they  are 
viewed  as  the  defects  of  such  a  temperament,  launched 
out  of  a  quiet,  secluded,  bookish  youth  into  a  world  of 
roughly  intriguing  cliques  and  factions,  "literature,"  as 
Mr.  Mark  Pattison  happily  puts  it,  "  a  mere  arena  of 
partisan  warfare,"  and  "  the  public  barbarized  by  the 
gladiatorial  spectacle  of  politics."  It  was  in  this  school 
that  Pope  acquired  his  habit  of  plotting  and  double- 
dealing.  Mr.  Courthope  suggests  that  he  may  have 
owed  the  habit  to  his  Roman  Catholic  training.  Equivo- 
cation was  regarded  by  them  as  an  excusable  weapon 
against  penal  laws,  and  what  is  allowed  in  particular 
cases  may  easily  be  extended  till  it  becomes  a  general 
rule  of  life.  It  may  well  be  that  Pope  was  helped  by 
the  casuistry  of  his  Church  in  justifying  his  crooked 
ways  to  his  own  conscience.  There  is  a  trace  of  this 
self-deception  in  the  words  of  his  letter  to  Martha 
Blount :  "  I  have  not  told  a  lie  (which  we  both  abom- 
inate), but  I  think  I  have  equivocated  pretty  genteelly." 
But,  in  truth,  Pope  did  not  need  to  go  to  his  persecuted 
co-religionists  for  lessons  in  the  art  of  genteel  equivoca- 
tion or  hardier  forms  of  duplicity.  His  political  friends, 
— and  every  man  about  town  was  then  a  politician, — 
Jacobite  and  Hanoverian  alike,  were  as  accomplished  in 
the  art  and  as  unscrupulous  in  the  practice  of  it  as  any 
Roman  Catholic  priest.  It  was  a  fierce  struggle  for  ex- 
istence in  the  political  world  when  the  succession  was 
uncertain  and  the  throne  insecure,  and  straightforward 
morality  was  not  in  fashion.  Statesmen  were  fighting 
with  life  and  all  that  made  it  worth  having  in  peril,  and 
were  ready  to  use  any  means  to  win,  whether  of  force  or 
fraud.  It  is  really  by  their  intellectual  qualities,  their 
ingenuity,  their  far-reaching  subtlet}^,  their  niceness  of 
calculation,  that  Pope's  intrigues  are  distinguished — 
their  intellectual  qualities  and  the  pettiness  of  their 
objects.  We  must  regard  them  as  an  imitation  in  his 
own  private  concerns  of  the  games  for  larger  stakes  that 


314  SUPPLEMENT 

were  going  on  round  him  in  the  political  field.  There 
can  be  no  doubt  that  Pope  had  great  natural  gifts  for 
intrigue,  and  that  he  took  to  it  with  great  relish.  The 
pleasure  of  the  sport,  the  employment  that  it  offered  to 
his  restless  ingenuity,  blinded  him  to  its  immorality,  and 
the  passion  grew  upon  him  till  he  could  do  nothing 
directly,  but  "  pla}red  the  politician  about  cabbages  and 
turnips."  The  fact  that  a  straight  line  is  the  shortest 
distance  between  two  points  wras  with  him  a  reason  for 
not  taking  it.  It  is  impossible  even  now  to  follow  him 
through  the  steps  of  any  of  the  intricate  plots  which 
recent  enquiry  has  unravelled  with  such  patience  without 
some  emotions  of  sympathy  wTith  the  artist's  delight  in 
his  contrivances,  so  ingenious  were  they,  and  out  of  all 
proportion  to  the  advantage  to  be  gained.  Ingenuity, 
of  course,  is  no  palliation  of  fraud  ;  but  the  amount  of 
our  indignation  cannot  but  be  affected  by  the  impostor's 
motives,  and  the  theory  that  finds  in  Pope's  tortuous 
conduct  nothing  but  mean  and  cowardly  hypocrisy  is 
simply  imperfect  analysis.  This  is  just  as  indiscriminate 
as  it  is  to  find  the  animating  spirit  of  his  Satires  in  arro- 
gant malignity  and  cruelty.  Mr.  Courthope  does  good 
service  in  his  chapter  on  "  The  War  With  the  Dunces  " 
in  tracing  the  history  of  the  quarrel,  and  showing  that 
the  most  shady  transactions  of  Pope's  later  years  were 
really  incidents  in  a  protracted  Avar  in  which  he  was  not 
the  original  aggressor.  Not  to  have  struck  the  first 
blow  in  a  quarrel  which  he  conducted  with  so  many  dis- 
creditable artifices  and  such  relentless  cruelty  is  not, 
perhaps,  much  to  boast  of.  But  wanton  malignity  is 
undoubtedly  a  less  respectable  motive  than  vindictive- 
ness,  if  we  are  to  admit  degrees  of  wickedness  and  of 
moral  reprobation  ;  and  it  is  something  to  have  it  estab- 
lished by  a  careful  judicial  examination  that  Pope  wras 
vindictive  rather  than  malignant. 

As  a  clear,  well-arranged,  and  well-divided  narrative 
of  Pope's  life,  pervaded  by  a  moderate  and  judicial  es- 


MR.  COURTIIOPE's   BIOGRAPHY    OF    POPE  315 

timate  of  his  character,  Mr.  Courthope's  biography  is 
admirable.  But  his  large  and  massive  method  of  han- 
dling, which  yields  such  excellent  results  in  the  con- 
densed narrative  of  intricate  events  and  the  judicial 
summing  up  of  the  complicated  cases  of  conscience,  is 
seen  to  want  flexibility  and  precision  when  applied  to 
such  a  many-sided  question  as  Pope's  place  in  litera- 
ture. Perspicuity  of  manner  is  gained  at  the  expense 
of  exactness  of  substance.  Mr.  Courthope,  indeed, 
places  Pope,  with  every  appearance  of  exactness,  with 
a  bold  geometrical  simplicity,  just  at  the  point  where 
lines  representing  Medievalism  and  the  Classical  Re- 
vival intersect  ;  but  he  is  not  so  successful  in  his  at- 
tempts to  justify  this  simple  diagram  as  corresponding 
to  historical  facts. 

The  defects  of  the  massive  method  of  handling  are 
that  it  involves  the  omission  of  connecting  links,  and 
the  assumption  of  large  and  definite  masses  common  to 
the  understanding  of  writer  and  reader.  If  the  latter 
condition  does  not  exist,  the  writer  is  tempted  to  take  it 
for  granted,  and  to  refer  to  periods  and  tendencies  on 
the  large  scale  as  if  their  characters  were  matters  of 
clear  and  common  knowledge,  or  at  least  established  ac- 
ceptation among  critics.  The  result  is  that  statements 
severally  distinct,  confident,  and  sonorous  give  rise  to  a 
good  deal  of  trouble  when  we  try  to  reduce  them  to 
consistency  for  ourselves,  or  when  the  writer  undertakes 
the  office  for  us,  and  attempts  to  supply  the  links  of 
connection.  Thus  Mr.  Courthope  opens  his  biography 
by  presenting  the  date  of  Pope's  birth  as  a  time  of 
unsettlement  and  confusion,  distracted  by  "  opposing 
forces,  Catholic  and  Protestant,  Whig  and  Tory,  Aris- 
totelian and  Baconian,  Medievalist  and  Classicist." 
Having  thus  boldly  described  the  situation,  he  passes 
at  once  to  his  hero  as  "  the  poet  who  learned  to  har- 
monize all  those  conflicting  principles  in  a  form  of  ver- 
sification so  clear  and  precise  that  for  fully  a  hundred 
24  J 


316  SUPPLEMENT 

years  after  be  began  to  write  it  was  accepted  as  the 
established  standard  of  metrical  mnsic."  It  is  a  mas- 
terful and  imposing  introduction,  but  when  the  dazzled 
mind  recovers,  and  asks  in  what  sense  Pope  can  be  said 
to  have  harmonized  Catholicism  and  Protestantism, 
Whiggism  and  Toryism,  Aristotelianism  and  Baconi- 
anism,  Medievalism  and  Classicism,  it  is  not  so  easy  to 
find  a  clear  answer.  It  is  right  to  say  at  once  in  fair- 
ness to  Mr.  Courthope  that  this  is  only  the  opening 
statement  of  his  thesis,  and  that  he  does  afterward  at- 
tempt, partly  at  least,  to  make  it  good,  and  enable  us 
to  follow  him  intelligently  in  his  bold  transition  from 
the  general  character  of  the  time  to  the  personality  of 
Pope  and  the  distinctive  character  of  his  work.  But  it 
is  right  also  to  say — and  it  illustrates  the  defects  of  the 
massive  manner — that  the  reader  would  go  very  far 
astray  who  should  take  in  its  most  obvious  and  literal 
sense  Pope's  harmonizing  of  these  mighty  opposites. 
To  see  how  Pope  harmonized  Catholicism  and  Protes- 
tantism one's  first  imjmlse  would  be  to  turn  to  the  "  Essay 
on  Man  ";  but  it  cannot  be  there  that  the  harmonization 
of  which  Mr.  Courthope  thinks  is  effected,  for  he  calls 
it — not  altogether  justly — "  a  farrago  of  fallacies." 
So  with  Whiggism  and  Toiyism.     We  recall  the  lines  : 

"  For  forms  of  government  let  fools  contest, 
Wliate'er  is  best  administered  is  best." 

This  cannot  be  the  reconciliation  spoken  of,  calling  both 
parties  equally  fools.  The  truth,  of  course,  is — if  I 
rightly  understand  Mr.  Courthope — that  he  uses  the 
words  Whiggism  and  Toryism,  Protestantism  and 
Catholicism,  etc.,  in  a  subtle  sense  to  signify  a  certain 
indefinite  central  idea  or  animating  principle.  The 
reader  who  wishes  to  penetrate  to  his  meaning  must 
tackle  two  very  perplexing  chapters,  one  on  the  "  Essay 
on  Criticism,"  and  a  second  on  Pope's  place  in  English 
Literature,  where  the  same  topic  is  resumed. 


MR.  COURTHOPE'S    BIOGRAPHY    OF    POPE  317 

These  chapters  are  the  least  satisfactory  part  of  the 
book.  Perhaps  it  is  that  Mr.  Courthope  has  tried  to 
crowd  too  much  into  too  little  space.  Seeing  that  he 
attempts  to  formulate  the  leading  changes  in  the  princi- 
ples of  poetic  creation  from  Aristotle  to  Wordsworth, 
with  the  "  Essay  on  Criticism  "  as  a  central  and  turn- 
ing point,  this  is  likely  enough.  Perhaps  it  is  that  his 
ideas  took  shape  as  he  wrote,  and  that  while  he  con- 
tinued to  make  large  and  definite  statements,  they  were 
not  originally  so  cast  as  to  show  their  coherency.  At 
any  rate  the  result  is  perplexing  enough.  Mr.  Court- 
hope  at  the  end  of  the  last  chapter  formulates  certain 
conclusions  about  Pope's  place  in  literature  that  one  can 
at  least  understand,  however  much  one  may  differ  from 
some  of  them  ;  but  the  discussion  through  which  he 
reaches  them  is  much  less  plain  sailing,  and  it  is  not  easy 
to  follow  the  connection  between  some  of  the  theories 
advanced  in  the  course  of  it  and  the  propositions  to 
which  we  are  finally  conducted.  Further,  though  the 
drift  of  the  argument,  so  far  as  I  can  make  it  out,  is 
paradoxical,  it  proceeds  often  by  statements  which  are 
among  the  commonplaces  of  criticism,  at  least  in  words, 
and  give  it  an  air  of  plausibility  till  we  see  that  it  com- 
pels us,  if  we  accept  it  as  sound,  to  give  them  a  special 
interpretation.  The  discussion  would  have  been  less 
intricate  if  Mr.  Courthope  had  tried  to  establish  Pope's 
position  inductively  by  an  examination  of  his  poetry  and 
a  comparison  of  it  with  what  came  before  and  after.  It 
is,  however,  by  way  of  abstract  discussion  of  his  critical 
principles  as  laid  down  in  the  Essay  that  he  proceeds, 
and  thus  we  are  involved  in  a  bewildering  series  of  defi- 
nitions  of  what  is  meant  by  Nature,  Wit,  True  Wit  and 
False  Wit,  Mediaeval  Methods,  and  Classical  Methods  and 
Modern  Methods.  Finally,  although  the  gist  of  the 
argument  seems  to  be  that  the  central  artistic  principle 
of  Pope  and  his  school  is  the  "  direct  imitation  of 
Nature,"  and   that  the  Essay,  in  virtue  of  its  distinct 


318  SUPPLEMENT 

enunciation  of  this  principle,  occupies  a  more  important 
position  in  literature  than  is  commonly  assigned  to  it,  I 
have  searched  in  vain  for  any  attempt  to  define  what 
is  meant  by  that  very  familiar  but  not  very  tangible 
phrase  "  imitation  of  Nature."  At  least  as  much  turns 
upon  the  meaning  of  that  as  on  the  meaning  of  Nature, 
and  the  conceptions  of  Nature  prevalent  at  different 
times.  But  I  will  try  to  disengage  his  main  positions, 
and  examine  what  they  seem  to  me  to  imply. 

The  starting-point  of  Mr.  Courthope's  dialectic,  which 
has  no  lack  of  freshness  and  vigor,  if  it  is  somewhat 
intricate,  is  the  "  Essay  on  Criticism,"  the  place  to  be 
assigned  to  it  in  literature,  and  Mr.  Leslie  Stephen's  dis- 
paraging description  of  it  as  a  "  coining  of  aphorisms 
out  of  commonplace."  This  Mr.  Courthope  challenges, 
and  maintains,  in  effect,  that  its  critical  principles  were 
not  commonplace  to  Pope's  own  generation,  but  that,  on 
the  contrary,  when  the  Essay  is  taken  in  relation  to  the 
course  of  literature  from  Aristotle  down  through  the 
Middle  Ages  to  the  time  of  Queen  Anne,  it  is  seen  to 
mark  an  epoch.  And  the  main  significance  of  this 
epoch  is,  as  I  understand  Mr.  Courthope,  the  return  after 
a  long  interval  to  a  conception  of  the  relations  between 
Nature  and  Art  identical  with  Aristotle's.  According 
to  Aristotle,  poetry  is  a  "  direct  imitation  of  Nature  "  ; 
and  Pope  brought  Poetry  back  from  Medievalism  to 
this  conception  when  he  counselled  poets  to 

"  First  follow  Nature,  arid  your  judgment  frame 
By  her  just  standard,  which  is  still  the  same." 

Mr.  Stephen  says  that  "  Follow  Nature  "  is  a  maxim 
"common  to  all  generations  of  critics."  Against  this 
Mr.  Courthope  develops  a  theory  of  the  essence  of 
Medievalism  as  consisting  in  the  imposition  of  subjec- 
tive and  metaphysical  conceptions  on  Nature,  and  con- 
tends that  the  significance  of  Pope's  advice  was  the 
clear  and   definite   repudiation   of   this   practice  ;  that 


MR.  COURTIIOrE's    BIOGRAPHY    OF   TOrE  319 

Pope  iii  effect  said :  "  Imitate  Nature  directly,"  and  that 
this  is  the  distinctive  feature  in  his  critical  principles. 
He  even  seems  to  hold  that  it  was  in  this  that  Pope's 
much  discussed  "  correctness "  consisted,  and  not  in 
stricter  attention  to  the  rules  of  metre  and  grammar 
and  rhetoric. 

All  this  is  comparatively  simple,  whether  or  not  we 
agree  with  it.  Perplexity  arises  when  we  begin  to  ask 
wherein  Pope's  adherence  to  the  standard  of  Nature 
distinguishes  him  from  our  great  poets  before  him  and 
our  great  poets  after  him.  We  understand  at  once  that 
Mr.  Courthope's  doctrine  is  opposed  to  the  common 
habit  in  our  century  of  speaking  of  Pope's  poetry  as 
"artificial."  So  far  I  am,  for  one,  in  complete  sympathy 
with  him.  But  does  he  mean  that  Pope  was  the  first 
poet  in  our  literature  to  set  up  the  just  standard  of 
Nature  ?  His  exposition  here  and  there  would  seem 
to  imply  this,  as  well  as  the  large  importance  that  he 
claims  for  the  Essay  ;  but  he  expressly  says  that  this  is 
not  his  meaning.  He  expressly  mentions  Chaucer  and 
Shakespeare  among  the  poets  who  have  imitated  Nat- 
ure directly.  But  if  this  direct  imitation  of  Nature  is 
the  distinctive  feature  of  Pope's  principles,  and  the 
ground  on  which  his  school  is  called  "  classical,"  why 
are  not  Chaucer  and  Shakespeare  also  called  "  classi- 
cal"? When  we  ask  this,  we  find  ourselves  not  far 
off  from  Mr.  Stephen's  position  that  the  following  of 
Nature  is  a  common  maxim.  Mr.  Courthope's  paradox 
would  seem,  then,  only  to  amount  to  saying  that  great 
poets  are  all  of  one  school.  What,  then,  was  distinctive 
in  Pope's  following  of  Nature  ? 

Mr.  Courthope  would  answer  this,- in  effect,  by  saying 
that  in  Pope's  mind  Nature  was  opposed  to  the  "  false 
wit,"  the  metaphors,  conceits,  fantastic  allusions,  and 
mystic  symbolism  of  what  Johnson  called  the  "  Meta- 
physical School "  of  the  seventeenth  century — Donne 
and    Cowley,   and    the    earlier    work    of   Dryden.     If 


320  SUPPLEMENT 

he  had  not  gone  beyond  this,  and  his  serviceable 
illustration  of  the  European  prevalence  of  this  false  wit 
for  more  than  a  century,  every-body  would  have  under- 
stood him  and  agreed  with  him.  It  is  tolerably  obvious 
that  abstinence  from  false  wit  in  this  sense  is  one  of  the 
items  of  Pope's  correctness  ;  he  expressly  particularizes 
it  himself.  Whether  or  not  it  is  warrantable  to  describe 
Pope's  method  generally  as  a  reaction  against  this  false 
wit,  as  if  it  constituted  the  whole  of  his  correctness,  is 
another  question.  But  Mr.  Courthope  does  not  stop 
here.  He  goes  on  to  connect  false  wit  with  Medieval- 
ism generally,  the  subtleties  of  Scholastic  Philosophy, 
Thomas  Aquinas,  the  Provencal  poets,  Dante  and 
Petrarch,  and  the  allegorical  and  symbolical  presenta- 
tion of  Nature.  Here  again  we  admit  the  connection  ; 
any  body  would  ;  there  is  an  obvious  affinity  between 
the  keen,  far-reaching,  beautifully  ingenious  analogies 
of  Donne  and  the  analytic  triumphs  of  the  Schoolmen, 
of  whom,  indeed,  Donne  was  at  one  time  a  close  student. 
We  admit  the  connection  ;  but  we  pause  when  we  are 
asked  to  jump  from  this  admission  to  the  conclusion 
that  Pope's  lines  : 

"  True  wit  is  Nature  to  advantage  dressed, 
What  oft  was  thought,  but  ne'er  so  well  expressed  " — 

were  a  formal  renunciation  not  merely  of  the  conceits 
of  the  poetry  of  the  seventeeth  century,  but  of  Medie- 
valism generally,  as  false  wit,  and  a  return  to  Aristotle 
and  the  standard  of  Nature. 

It  certainly  is  a  most  ingenious  argument.  If  Mr. 
Courthope  may  claim  to  rank  with  Johnson  as  a  judge 
of  Pope's  morality,  he  may  equally  claim  to  rank  with 
Warburton  as  an  interpreter  of  Pope's  meaning.  His 
interpretation  of  Pope's  Classicism  as  opposed  to  Medie- 
valism carries  with  it  the  relation  of  the  Essay  to 
Whiggism  and  Toryism,  Protestantism  and  Catholicism, 
Baconianism  and  Aristotelianism.     Up. to  the  time  of 


MR.  COURTHOPe'S    BIOGRAPHY    OF    POPE  321 

the  Revolution,  which  seated  a  Protestant  on  the  throne, 
the  Court  had  a  leaning  to  Catholicism,  and  thereby 
encouraged  Medievalism,  and  the  Tories  were  the  party 
of   the   Court.     Thus,   although    Pope   himself   was   a 
Catholic  and  a  personal  friend  of  the  leading  Tories,  the 
"  Essay  on  Criticism,"  in  virtue  of  its  protest  against 
Medievalism  in  poetry,  falls  into  line  with  the  anti- 
medieval  spirit  of  Whiggism  and  Protestantism.     By 
Aristotelianism  as  opposed   to  Baconianism  Mr.  Court- 
hope  must  mean  the  philosophy  of  Aristotle  as  devel- 
oped by  the  Schoolmen,  for  it  is  part  of  his  theory  that 
Pope  used  the  word  Nature  in  the  same  sense  as  Bacon, 
and  consequently  in  the  same  sense  as  Aristotle.     One 
is  still  left  wondering  what  exactly  he  meant  by  saying 
that  Pope  "  harmonized  "  all  those  opposing  forces,  see- 
ing that  the  Essay  is  held  to  have  signalized  the  final 
triumph  of  one  class  of  them.     But  it  is  a  most  inge- 
nious theory,  certainly  "  witty  "  according  to  the  defini- 
tion  of   wit  that  Mr.   Courthope   quotes  from  Locke, 
whether  we  are  to  reckon  it  as  true  wit  or  the  opposite. 
Mr.   Courthope's  theory  about  the   place  of  Pope's 
"  Essay  on  Criticism  "  is  so  far  sound  that  it  maintains, 
in  a  very  abstract  and  metaphysical  manner,  the  toler- 
ably plain  fact  that  the  Essay  was  part  of  the  general 
and  gradual  emancipation   of  the  English   mind  from 
medieval  habits  of  thought.     Beyond  this  he  does  not 
seem  to  me  to  establish  his  case.     Pope  got  less  than 
his  deserts  from  the  critics  of  the  last  two  generations  : 
the  fashion  of   taste  had  gone  against  him  ;    but  we 
should  go  as  far  wrong  in  the  opposite  direction  if  we 
argued  that  the  advent  of  Pope  in  poetry  was  an  event 
comparable  to  the  advent  of  Newton  in  physical  science, 
or  to  the  advent  of  Locke  in  philosophy.     Even  if  we 
admit  that  "  True  wit  is  Nature  to  advantage  dressed  " 
did   mean  in   Pope's   mind    "  True    poetry   is   Nature 
directly  imitated,"  how  can  a  method  which  Pope  had 
in  common  with  Chaucer  and  Shakespeare,  Ariosto  and 


322  SUPPLEMENT 

Cervantes,  be  said  to  be  so  distinctive  of  a  school  as  to 
warrant  the  title  of  "  classical  "  ?  Personally  I  do  not 
think  that  the  differentia  of  the  so-called  "  classical " 
school  is  to  be  found  in  formal  critical  principles  ;  it 
seems  to  me  to  lie  rather,  as  I  have  indicated  before  in 
this  magazine,  in  unconscious  habits  of  expression.  It 
has  obtained  the  name  " classical"  on  more  superficial 
grounds,  namely,  that  translations  of  Latin  and  Greek 
masterpieces  and  imitations  of  leading  classical  forms 
were  among  its  most  conspicuous  productions,  and  that 
its  critics,  in  the  earlier  period  of  the  school,  professed 
great  deference  for  the  ancient  authorities.  Certainly 
directness  cannot  be  said  to  have  been  a  prominent 
feature  of  its  imitations  of  Nature,  if  direct  imitation  is 
the  opposite  of  allusive,  allegorical,  and  abstract  presen- 
tation. We  may  pass  "The  Rape  of  the  Lock"  as 
direct,  if  we  get  a  definition  of  Nature  that  includes 
sylphs  and  gnomes;  but  what  shall  we  say  of  "The 
Dunciad  "  ?  And  what  shall  we  say  of  the  countless 
odes  to  and  descriptions  of  personified  Seasons,  Passions, 
Institutions,  Conditions,  Faculties,  which  held  the  field 
till  the  last  years  of  the  century  ?  These  were  at  least 
as  much  indirect  imitations  as  the  "  Roman  de  la  Rose," 
the  great  mediaeval  example  of  allegory,  and  yet  they 
form  the  bulk  of  the  work  of  the  "  classical "  school. 

Mr.  Courthope  has  not  proved  his  paradox  about 
Pope's  relation  to  his  predecessors,  and  he  makes  out  a 
still  less  plausible  case  for  a  still  bolder  paradox  about 
Pope's  relation  to  Wordsworth.  There  is  such  a  refresh- 
ing novelty  about  a  theory  which  upholds  Pope  as  dis- 
tinctively the  poet  of  Nature,  and  Wordsworth  as  a 
reactionary  ally  of  "false  wit,"  that  one  could  wish  it 
were  not  so  manifestly  strained  and  perverse.  It  is  to 
be  regretted,  too,  for  another  reason,  that  just  as  there  is 
justice  in  Mr.  Courthope's  defence  of  Pope  against  the 
charge  of  being  peculiarly  artificial,  he  does  lay  stress 
upon  a  feature  in  Wordsworth's  theory  of  poetry  that 


MR.  COURTHOPe's   BIOGRAPHY    OF   POPE  323 

is  very  often  overlooked.  Wordsworth,  though  he  is 
commonly  called  the  poet  of  Nature,  claims  supremacy 
for  the  imagination  in  poetic  work  : 

"  Imagination  needs  must  stir.   .   . 
Minds  that  have  nothing  to  confer 
Find  little  to  perceive." 

Coleridge  says  the  same  thing  in  the  familiar  lines  : 

"  Dear  Lady,  we  receive  but  what  we  give, 
And  in  our  life  alone  does  Nature  live." 

There  is  no  antagonism  between  this  and  adherence 
to  the  just  standard  of  Nature,  unless  Nature  is  taken 
in  a  veiy  limited  sense  ;  but  it  gives  Mr.  Courthope  an 
opening  for  connecting  the  modern  poets  with  the  false 
wits  whom  Pope  superseded,  and  developing  and  point- 
ing against  them  a  new  interpretation  of  the  line  : 

"  What  oft  was  thought,  but  ne'er  so  well  expressed." 

"  Pope,  the  antagonist  of  the  metaphysical  school,  had  taught 
that  the  essence  of  poetry  was  the  presentation  in  a  perfect  form, 
of  imaginative  materials  common  to  the  poet  and  the  reader : 

'  What  oft  was  thought,  but  ne'er  so  well  expressed.' 

Wordsworth  maintained,  on  the  contrary,  that  matter  not  in  itself 
stimulating  to  the  general  imagination  might  become  a  proper 
subject  for  poetry  if  glorified  by  the  imagination  of  the  poet. 
There  is  an  obvious  analogy  between  this  method  of  composition 
and  the  wit,  or  discordia  concors,  which  was  the  aim  of  the  seven- 
teenth-century poet." 

This  would  have  been  true  enough  if  it  had  been  part 
of  Wordsworth's  theory  that  a  poet's  imagination  may 
give  poetic  value  to  any  thing, — a  broomstick,  for  in- 
stance,— irrespective  of  the  ordinary  laws  of  feeling.  It 
is  only  by  taking  this  as  Wordsworth's  meaning  that 
Mr.  Courthope  is  able  to  give  a  semblance  of  plausibility 
to  his  case,  and,  starting  with  a  little  misunderstanding, 


324  SUPPLEMENT 

he  goes  on  to  enlarge  this  till  we  find  him  taking  it  as  a 
condition  of  poetic  work  on  Wordsworth's  theory  that 
the  poet  should  "  burn  the  bridge  of  connection  between 
himself  and  his  readers  "  ;  that  is,  should  consult  only 
his  own  feelings,  and  pay  no  regard  to  the  manner  in 
which  other  men  think  and  feel.  In  answer  to  this  it  is 
sufficient  to  point  out  that  the  opposite  of  this  is  repeat- 
edly asserted  to  be  a  poet's  duty  in  the  Preface  to  the 
"  Lyrical  Ballads,"  a  document  to  which  Mr.  Courthope 
refers  as  an  "animated  rhetorical  treatise,"  but  which, 
judging  from  his  extraordinary  perversions  of  its  lead- 
ing doctrines,  he  cannot  have  studied  very  attentively. 
How  can  he  reconcile  the  following  extract  from  the 
Preface  with  what  he  says  of  Wordsworth's  theory  : 

"  The  Poet  is  chiefly  distinguished  from  other  men  by  a  greater 
promptness  to  think  and  feel  without  immediate  external  excite- 
ment, a  greater  power  in  expressing  such  thoughts  and  feelings  as 
are  produced  in  him  in  that  manner.  But  these  passions  and 
thoughts  and  feelings  art  the  general  passions  and  thoughts  and  feel- 
ings of  men." 

The  truth  is  that  Wordsworth's  quarrel  with  artificial 
poetic  diction  was  that  it  was  not  intelligible  to  men  in 
general  as  the  appropriate  expression  of  the  feelings  de- 
scribed.    "  The  poet  thinks  and  feels,"  he  said,  "  in  the 
spirit  of  human  passions.     How,  then,  can  his  language 
differ  from  that  of  all  other  men  who  feel  vividly  and 
see  clearly  ?  "     Wordsworth  was  very  far  indeed  from 
ignoring,  even  in  theory,  the  need  of  "imaginative  ma- 
terials common  to  the  poet  and  the  reader,"  and  he  was 
fully  alive  to  the  danger  of  yielding  to  what  he  called 
"  particular  associations  "  as  distinguished  from  such  as 
were  general  ;  but,  as  he  explains,  he  was  obliged  to 
trust  his  own  judgment  as  to  what  would  be  intelligible 
to   his   readers.     What  other  judgment  than  his  own 
would  Mr.  Courthope  suggest  for  the  poet's  guidance  ? 
How  can  the  poet  reach  the  common  heart  or  the  com- 


MK.  COURTHOPE'S    BIOGKAPHY    OF    POPE  325 

mon  mind  except  through  his  own  heart  and  mind  ? 
Where  else  can  he  find  his  imaginative  materials?  But 
it  is  not  easy  to  make  out  what  function  Mr.  Courthope 
assigns  to  the  imagination  in  poetry.  "  In  every  great 
epic  or  dramatic  poem,"  he  says,  "the  action  or  fable, in 
every  great  lyric  poem  the  passion,  is  not  imagined  and 
discovered  by  the  poet,  but  [what  is  the  point  of  the 
antithesis?]  is  shared  by  the  poet  with  his  audience  ; 
the  element  contributed  by  a  poet  singly  is  the  concep- 
tion and  form  of  the  poem."  "  The  imaginative  mate- 
rials are  common  to  the  poet  and  the  audience."  Mr. 
Courthope  seems  to  mean  that  unless  a  poet  chooses  sub- 
jects— fables,  situations,  characters,  passions — that  are 
easily  and  widely  intelligible,  and  intrinsically  interest- 
ing, he  must  be  content  with  a  limited  audience.  But 
why  should  this  be  said  in  words  which  appear  to  deny 
the  creative  character  of  the  imagination,  as  if  Shakes- 
peare had  not  "  imagined  "  the  passion  of  Hamlet  and 
Othello,  or  Milton  had  not  "  imagined  "  the  bearing,  the 
despair,  and  the  defiant  hatred  of  his  rebel  angels  in  the 
fiery  pit  ? 

On  his  title-page  Mr.  Courtney  quotes  the  saying  of 
Horace:  "  Difficile  est  proprie  communia  dicere"  It  is 
difficult ;  but  one  often  feels  in  reading  his  critical  chap- 
ters that  he  has  succeeded.  One  could  wish  that  his 
exposition  of  his  paradoxes  had  been  as  successful  as  his 
disguise  of  his  endoxes,  for  it  is  a  gallant  and  vigorous 
attempt  to  give  new  life  to  an  old  controversy. 


II 

THE  SUPPOSED  TYRANNY  OF  POPE 

There  is  one  notable  change  in  Pope's  position  since 
the  last  centenary  of  his  birth.  His  manner  is  now  old 
enough  to  bear  revival.  A  clever  writer  of  epigram- 
matic couplets,  with  something  much  less  exquisite  than 
Pope's  mastery  of  his  favorite  stave,  and  much  less 
strong  and  keen  than  his  wit, — a  passably  clever  imitator 
in  short, — would  be  certain  now  of  a  wide  and  cordial 
welcome.  Of  course  a  certain  discretion  would  have  to 
be  shown  in  the  line  of  imitation  ;  not  all  the  master's 
subjects  would  serve  equally  well  for  the  modern  dis- 
ciple. We  should  probably  find  little  to  admire  in  a 
new  "  Windsor  Forest  "  ;  even  a  new  "  Essay  on  Man," 
with  all  our  recent  modern  developments  in  philosophy 
and  religion  thrown  in,  might  not  attract  as  wide  a  circle 
of  readers  as  "  Robert  Elsmere  "  ;  but  it  may  safely  be 
said  that  the  time  is  ripe  for  new  "  Imitations  of  Horace'" 
if  only  the  man  were  ready.  As  for  a  new  "  Dunciad," 
that  is  a  more  delicate  subject  to  hint  at,  as  nobody 
knows  what  might  happen,  and  it  would  not  be  a  com- 
fortable experience  to  be  hitched  into  the  rhyme  if  the 
new  satirist  had  as  sharp  a  tooth  as  his  great  original. 
It  is  better  to  let  sleeping  cynics  lie.  But  certainly  it  is 
a  wonder  that  in  these  days  of  "New"  things,  New 
Lucians,  New  Republics,  New  Plutarchs,  and  so  forth, 
nobody  should  have  essayed  to  give  us  a  New  Dunciad. 
Is  it  that  in  this  age  of  universal  cleverness  we  have  no 
Dunces,  or  that  Pope's  form  is  not  quite  so  easy  to 
imitate  as  it  was  the  fashion  fifty  years  ago  to  say  ?  Or 
is  it  that  we  are  all  so  very  good-natured  that  the  "  airy 

326 


THE    SUPPOSED   TYRANNY    OF    POPE  327 

malevolence "   of   the    great    satirist    would    not     be 
tolerated  ? 

This  much  at  least  is  certain,  that  if  we  had  material, 
and  a  satirist,  and  if  our  satirist  were  dexterous  enough 
to  evade  the  law  of  libel, — another  barrier  to  the  imitator 
of  Pope, — the  form  of  epigrammatic  couplets  would  now 
have  all  the  charm  of  novelty,  whereas  a  hundred  years 
ago  the  public  ear  was  tired  of  them.  From  the  first  of 
these  propositions  we  imagine  there  will  be  no  dissent  ; 
but  as  regards  the  second  a  very  general  impression  to 
the  contrary  prevails.  In  spite  of  the  labors  of  such 
accurate  historians  of  literature  as  the  late  Mr.  Mark 
Pattison  and  Mr.  Stopford  Brooke,  Pope's  relations  to 
the  poetry  of  the  latter  half  of  the  eighteenth  century 
are  still  very  generally  misunderstood.  If  the  average 
educated  man,  with  some  knowledge  of  the  broad  out- 
lines of  literary  history  but  no  special  interest  in  its 
details,  were  asked,  as  a  question  pertinent  to  the,  recent 
celebration,  what  would  have  been  the  probable  recep- 
tion of  a  poem  in  Pope's  manner  when  last  his  centenary 
came  round,  he  would  probably  answer  out  of  a  vague 
impression  that  in  the  year  1788  a  poem  in  any  other 
manner  would  have  been  promptly  extinguished  by  the 
critics.  The  general  notion  is  that  the  authority  of 
Pope  was  supreme  throughout  the  eighteenth  century, 
and  that  it  remained  unshaken  till  the  advent  of  the  new 
potentates,  Wordsworth,  Coleridge,  Scott,  and  Byron. 
It  is  supposed  that  the  public  taste  was  so  devoted  to  Pope 
and  what  is  called  the  "  classical  school"  that  no  depart- 
ure from  its  principles  of  composition  would  have  been 
received  with  patience  ;  that  even  Milton  and  the  great 
Elizabethans  were  decried  and  neglected  ;  and  that  long 
and  determined  efforts  were  needed  before  the  public 
could  be  brought  back  to  a  higher  standard  of  poetic 
excellence.  This,  indeed,  is  commonly  given  as  the  ex- 
planation of  the  utter  decay  of  poetry  in  the  eighteenth 
century,  that  people  lived  in  slavish  subjection  to  narrow 


328  SUPPLEMENT 

and  exclusive  rules  of  art ;  that  all  who  felt  an  impulse 
to  write  in  verse  were  intimidated  into  taking  artificial 
standards  as  their  guide  rather  than  Nature  ;  that  genius 
was  stifled  by  timid  and  laborious  endeavor  after  cor- 
rectness. And  Pope's  name  was  the  bugbear  used  to 
frighten  unruly  genius  into  submission. 

Such  was  the  view  of  the  poetry  of  the  eighteenth 
century  proclaimed  with  authority  some  fifty  years  ago, 
and  still,  after  a  good  many  years  of  sober  contradiction, 
very  extensively  held.  An  opinion  backed  by  the  con- 
fident and  brilliant  rhetoric  of  Macaulay  is  not  easily 
dislodged.  The  reaction  against  the  critical  school 
that  set  in  with  the  great  poetic  expansion  at  the  be- 
ginning of  this  century  was  definitely  established  by 
Macaulay's  article  on  Moore's  "  Life  of  Byron  "  in  the 
Edinburgh  Review.  It  gave  articulate  expression  to 
the  effect  produced  on  the  public  mind  by  the  destruc- 
tive criticism  of  which  Wordsworth,  Coleridge,  and 
Bowles  were  the  leading  exponents.  Their  tone,  of 
course,  was  much  more  judicial,  but  since  they  laid 
stress  on  the  defects  of  Pope,  and  the  public  had  been 
accustomed  for  two  or  three  generations  to  hear  chiefly 
of  his  merits,  the  general  impression  produced  was  that 
his  poetry  was  essentially  and  radically  vicious,  that  he 
was,  as  it  were,  an  impostor  who  had  long  deceived  the 
people,  but  had  been  detected  and  exposed  at  last. 
This  exaggerated  condemnation  was  not  the  fault  of 
the  new  critics,  but  it  was  the  natural  result  of  their 
saying  what  they  said  at  the  time  when  they  said  it. 
That  happened  in  Pope's  case  which  happens  in  the 
progress  of  all  conceptions  toward  exact  qualification. 
Thinking  on  any  subject  is  generally  done  by  halves  or 
by  bits,  each  of  which  as  it  comes  into  prominence  fills 
the  area  of  the  whole  truth.  As  long  as  the  public 
mind  was  dazzled  by  certain  splendid  qualities  in  Pope's 
verse,  these  qualities  virtually  represented  the  sum  of 
poetic  excellence  ;  he  was  simply  a  poet ;  there  was  no 


THE    SUPPOSED    TYRANNY    OF    POPE  329 

question  of  defects  or  limitations.  There  came  a  time 
when  the  defects  were  loudly  insisted  upon,  and  the  public 
mind  was  occupied  in  the  same  exclusive  manner  with 
poetic  excellence  of  a  different  type  which  had  yet 
to  undergo  its  process  of  qualification.  Pope  was  then 
simply  no  poet  ;  he  was  the  complete  antithesis  of 
poetic  excellence.  Pope's  reputation  followed  the 
ordinary  law  in  passing  through  those  two  violent 
stages  on  its  way  toward  a  more  fixed  and  definite 
formation  ;  it  may  safely  he  said  to  have  now  reached 
a  further  sta°:e  in  which  merits  and  defects  are  no 
longer  in  mutually  destructive  antagonism,  and  Pope 
is  recognized  as  a  great  poet,  to  be  admired,  enjoyed, 
and  studied  for  what  he  was,  without  being  despised 
or  neglected  for  what  he  was  not. 

We  speak  of  the  conception  of  Pope's  poetry  in  that 
vague  but  none  the  less  real  receptacle  of  ideas,  the 
general  mind,  to  the  fluctuations  and  advances  of  which 
it  is  not  easy  to  obtain  a  definite  index.  Perhaps  one 
of  the  most  satisfactory  gauges  of  public  opinion, 
whether  of  men  or  of  measures,  is  to  be  found  in  the 
attitude  of  moderate  critics.  If  modern  critics  are  apolo- 
getic and  conciliatory  in  hinting  at  blemishes,  the  man 
or  the  measure,  we  may  be  sure,  stands  high  in  public 
estimation.  In  the  case  of  Pope  we  find  that  in  the 
eighteenth  century,  before  his  poetry  had  passed  through 
the  crucible  of  the  Wordsworthian  school,  such  a 
moderate  critic  as  Joseph  Warton  had  to  be  cautious  in 
pointing  out  Pope's  limitations  ;  whereas  thirty  years 
ago  such  a  temperate  admirer  as  Mr.  Carruthers  had  to 
guard  himself  carefully  against  the  charge  of  putting 
Pope's  merits  too  high.  More  recently  Mr.  Elwin's 
elaborate  criticism  of  Pope  has  been  received  with 
some  impatience  on  account  of  its  hostile  and  unsym- 
pathetic tone  ;  and  the  remarks  made  about  him  within 
the  last  two  months  have  shown  a  disposition  to  make 
amends  for  the  violence  of  previous  disparagement. 


330  SUPPLEMENT 

While  there  has  been  this  oscillation  concerning 
Pope's  merits  in  the  general  mind,  following  in  its  own 
way  the  movements  of  critical  dialectic,  there  has  been 
comparatively  little  substantial  difference  of  opinion 
among  the  few  who,  in  Wordsworth's  language,  make 
"a  serious  study  of  poetry."  Although  critics  of  the 
Wordsworthian  school  discredited  Pope  so  much  that 
it  became  among  their  more  foolish  adherents  a  mark 
of  corrupt  taste  to  find  a  word  to  say  in  favor  of  any 
thing  written  in  the  eighteenth  century,  the  leaders 
themselves,  especially  Coleridge  and  Bowles,  were  by 
no  means  insensible  to  Pope's  unrivalled  brilliancy 
within  his  own  limits.  On  the  other  hand,  it  is  a  mis- 
take to  suppose  that  the  critics  of  the  eighteenth  cen- 
tury, even  in  the  generation  immediately  after  Pope's 
own,  were  unconscious  of  those  limits,  although  they 
had  more  complete  sympathy  with  the  poet's  merits 
and  were  more  ungrudging  in  their  praise.  Too  many 
of  us  still  see  even  the  criticism  of  the  eighteenth  cen- 
tury through  the  spectacles  of  reactionaries  who  were  in 
too  violent  a  heat  to  see  clearly.  The  admiration  of  Pope 
was  not  an  unqualified  and  unreasoning  idolatry  among 
the  critics  of  the  eighteenth  century.  Even  Bowles's 
main  contention,  over  which  there  was  so  much  discus- 
sion at  the  beginning  of  this  century,  that  satiric  and 
ethic  poetry  are  necessarily  from  their  subject-matter 
inferior  species,  and  cannot  entitle  a  poet  to  the  first 
rank  however  masterly  in  execution,  was  put  forward 
in  substance  by  Joseph  Warton  as  early  as  1756.  It 
was  put  forward  in  substance,  though  with  a  slight 
difference,  Warton's  exact  position  being  that  wit  and 
satire  are  transitory  and  perishable,  while  nature  and 
passion  are  eternal.  And  ten  years  earlier  this  same 
ambitious  youth,  having  just  taken  his  degree  at  Oxford, 
issued  a  volume  of  odes,  in  the  j:>reface  to  which  he 
expressed  a  modest  hope  that  they  "  would  be  looked 
upon  as  an  attempt  to  bring  poetry  back  into  its  right 


THE    SUPPOSED    TYRANNY    OF   POPE  331 

channel,"  bis  opinion  being  tbat  "invention  and  imagi- 
nation are  tbe  cbief  faculties  of  a  poet,"  and  tbat  "  tbe 
fasbion  of  moralizing  in  verse  bad  been  carried  too  far." 
Tliis  was  in  1746,  within  three  years  of  Pope's  death, 
and  the  bold  venture  was  so  far  successful  that  a  second 
edition  was  at  once  called  for.  The  Odes  of  Walton's 
school-fellow  and  friend,  Collins,  who  wrote  in  the 
same  independent  spirit,  but  with  infinitely  greater 
genius,  were  published  at  the  same  time ;  they  bad, 
indeed,  intended  at  first  to  publish  together.  The 
poetry  of  Collins  was  of  a  much  less  simple,  common- 
place, and  popular  cast,  and  his  volume  of  Odes  re- 
mained unsold  ;  but  it  opened  the  door  to  an  intimacy 
with  Thomson  and  Johnson,  an  evidence  that  such 
critical  authorities  were  far  from  being  disposed  to 
stifle  genius  that  did  not  accommodate  itself  to  the 
manner  of  Pope.  But  it  may  be  said  that  Warton's 
free  criticism  of  Pope  was  only  an  impotent  heresy, 
an  individual  eccentricity  serving  only  to  make  more 
marked  the  general  drift  of  opinion.  Was  it  not  the 
case  that  he  kept  back  the  second  part  of  his  essay  for 
more  than  a  quarter  of  a  century  and  that  Johnson 
supposed  the  reason  for  this  to  be  "  disappointment  at 
not  having  been  able  to  persuade  the  world  to  be  of  bis 
opinion  as  to  Pope"?  Yes:  but  the  "opinion"  to 
which  Johnson  referred  was  the  opinion  that  Pope's 
reputation  in  the  future  would  rest  upon  his  "  Windsor 
Forest,"  his  "Eloisa  to  Abelard,"  and  his  "Rape  of  the 
Lock,"  rather  than  upon  his  moral  and  satirical  poems. 
Of  Warton's  essay  itself — or  rather  of  the  first  part,  for 
the  second  part  was  not  published  till  a  year  or  two 
before  his  death — the  great  critic  repeatedly  wrote  and 
spoke  in  terms  of  the  highest  praise.  It  was  this  essay 
that  he  described  as  "  a  book  which  teaches  how  the 
brow  of  Criticism  may  be  smoothed,  and  how  she  may 
be  enabled,  with  all  her  severity,  to  attract  and  delight." 

No  man  was  ever  less  disposed  than  Johnson  to  sup- 
25 


332  SUPPLEMENT 

press  independent  criticism,  however  paradoxical  this 
may  seem  to  those  who  have  been  taught  to  regard  him 
as  the  inflexible  administrator  of  narrow  and  arbitrary- 
critical  laws.  He  was  punctiliously  conscientious  in 
always  giving  a  reason  for  his  critical  decisions.  Lord 
Mansfield's  famous  advice  to  the  judge  who  knew  no 
law  would  have  been  abhorrent  to  one  who  prided  him- 
self on  his  knowledge  of  critical  law,  and  who  held  that 
all  critical  laws  worthy  of  respect  were  founded  in 
reason.  "  Reason  wants  not  Horace  to  support  it," 
was  one  of  his  characteristic  maxims.  That  his  reasons 
were  always  valid  would  be  too  much  to  claim  ;  but 
they  were  always,  except  when  thrown  off  in  the 
caprice  of  conversation,  the  result  of  profound  and 
penetrating  thought,  and  he  would  be  a  very  presump- 
tuous critic  that  should  lightly  set  them  aside. 

"  Temporary  arrest  of  poetic  expansion  "  would  be  a 
fairer  description  of  what  took  place  in  the  eighteenth 
century  than  "  utter  decay  of  poetry  "  ;  and  to  assign  as 
the  explanation  of  this  arrest  the  overbearing  force  of 
Pope's  example,  or  the  chilling  influence  of  Johnson's 
precepts,  or  slavish  subservience  to  arbitrary  rules  is,  to 
put  it  soberly,  not  to  give  a  sufficient  explanation.  It 
is  not  quite  fair  to  criticism  to  regard  it  as  if  its  main 
function  were  to  direct  and  nourish  the  poetry  of  the 
period,  and  to  argue  that  it  stands  condemned  as  neces- 
sarily unsound  if  the  contemporary  poetical  crop  is  poor 
and  scanty.  It  has  been  too  much  the  habit  of  literary 
historians  to  look  upon  the  poverty  of  the  poetry  as  the 
main  literary  phenomenon  of  the  eighteenth  century. 
If  the  idea  had  occurred — and  it  is  at  least  worthy  of 
examination — that  possibly  the  critical  school  of  which 
Johnson  was  the  master  helped  to  lay  a  foundation  for 
the  splendid  outburst  of  poetic  production  in  a  subse- 
quent generation,  the  critical  principles  of  the  eigh- 
teenth century  would  have  had  a  fairer  chance  of  being 
judged  upon  their  merits.     Johnson   was  certainly  no 


THE    SUPPOSED    TYRANNY    OP    POPE  333 

champion  of  narrow  and  exclusive  tenets.  There  were 
certain  obvious  and  definite  qualities  in  Pope — smooth, 
melodious  rhythm,  clear  sense,  elegance  or  refinement 
of  phrase  and  idea — on  which  he  frequently  dwelt  as 
high  poetic  merits.  "Here,"  he  exclaimed  of  Pope's 
"Eloisa,"  "is  particularly  observable  the  curiosa felici- 
tas,  a  fruitful  soil  and  careful  cultivation.  Here  is  no 
crudeness  of  sense,  no  asperity  of  language."  But 
highly  as  he  admired  such  qualities,  and  although  he 
probably  did  not  feel  with  sufficient  force  the  danger  of 
buying  them  at  too  great  a  sacrifice,  the  absence  of 
them  did  not  blind  him  to  other  merits.  He  appreciated 
the  power  of  Collins,  though  he  did  find  fault  with  his 
occasional  obscurity  and  his  "  harsh  clusters  of  conso- 
nants." He  found  harshness  and  barbarity  in  the  dic- 
tion of  Milton,  but  that  did  not  prevent  him  from 
speaking  of  Milton  as  "that  poet  whose  works  may 
possibly  be  read  when  every  other  monument  of  British 
greatness  is  obliterated,"  or  from  saying  that  "  such  is 
the  power  of  his  poetry  that  his  call  is  obeyed  without 
resistance,  the  reader  feels  himself  in  captivity  to  a 
higher  and  a  nobler  mind,  and  criticism  sinks  in  ad- 
miration." With  all  his  love  for  Pope  he  found  pas- 
sages in  Dryden  "  drawn  from  a  profundity  that  Pope 
could  never  reach."  He  criticised  Shakespeare,  as  he 
said,  "  without  curious  malignity  or  superstitious  vener- 
ation," but  whoever  thinks  that  he  measured  Shakes- 
peare by  cold  and  formal  notions  of  correctness  should 
read  his  noble  preface.  "  The  work  of  a  correct  and 
regular  writer  is  a  garden  accurately  formed  and  dili- 
gently planted,  varied  with  shades  and  scented  with 
flowers  ;  the  composition  of  Shakespeare  is  a  forest,  in 
which  oaks  extend  their  branches  and  pines  tower  in 
the  air,  interspersed  sometimes  with  weeds  and  bram- 
bles, and  sometimes  giving  shelter  to  myrtles  and  roses  ; 
filling  the  eye  with  awful  pomp,  and  gratifying  the 
mind  with  endless  diversity."     This  is  not  the  language 


334  SUPPLEMENT 

of   a  narrow  and  exclusive  critic  with  a  single  eye  to 
correctness  of  an  artificial  kind. 

The  poetic  barrenness  certainly  cannot  be  explained 
by  the  predominance  of  narrow  and  exclusive  critical 
theories.  Exclusive  admiration  of  Pope  and  the  classi- 
cal school,  contented  acquiescence  in  its  methods  and 
subjects  as  the  perfection  of  art,  inability  to  feel  and 
enjoy  excellence  of  any  other  kind,  cannot  be  charged 
against  the  critics  of  the  time.  Pope  himself  was  by 
no  means  insensible  to  the  greatness  of  his  great  pred- 
ecessors, Chaucer,  Spenser,  Shakespeare,  and  Milton. 
His  conversations  with  Spence  afford  abundant  evi- 
dence of  his  catholicity  as  well  as  his  delicacy  of  judg- 
ment. And  if  we  pass  from  Pope  to  his  successors  in 
the  eighteenth  century,  we  find  that  we  cannot  number 
disrespect  for  Shakespeare  among  the  causes  of  their 
poetic  incompetence,  and  that  Nature  was  often  in  their 
heads,  if  not  in  their  hearts,  as  the  great  original  from 
which  the  poet  ought  to  draw.  The  Winchester  school- 
boys, Warton  and  Collins,  were,  perhaps,  singular  in 
their  enthusiasm  for  Spenser.  But  the  cult  of  Shakes- 
peare was  universal.  Edition  followed  edition,  and  com- 
mentary  commentary,  while  Garrick  in  Shakespearian 
parts  was  the  delight  of  the  town.  When  Akenside,  in 
the  last  year  of  Pope's  life,  extolled  with  much  ap- 
plause "  The  Pleasures  of  the  Imagination,"  he  began 
by  invoking  the  aid  of  "  Fancy,"  as  the  Spirit  of 
Poetry  : 

' '  From  the  fruitful  banks 
Of  Avon,  whence  thy  rosy  fingers  cull 
Fresh  flowers  and  dews  to  sprinkle  on  the  turf 
Where  Shakespeare  lies." 

A  few  years  later,  in  1749,  when  a  company  of  French 
players  acted  by  subscription  at  the  Theatre  Royal, 
Akenside's  enthusiasm  was  such  that  he  treated  their 
visit  as  an  insult  to  Shakespeare,  and  put  the  following 


THE    SUPPOSED   TYRANNY    OP   POPE  335 

"Remonstrance"    into    the    mouth    of    the    outraged 
dramatist  : 

"  What  though  the  footsteps  of  my  devious  Muse 
The  measured  walks  of  Grecian  art  refuse  ? 
Or  though  the  frankness  of  my  hardy  style 
Mock  the  nice  touches  of  the  critic's  file  ? 
Yet  what  my  age  and  climate  held  to  view 
Impartial  I  surveyed  and  fearless  drew. 
And  say,  ye  skilful  in  the  human  heart, 
Who  know  to  prize  a  poet's  noblest  part, 
What  age,  what  clime,  could  e'er  an  ampler  field, 
For  lofty  thought,  for  daring  fancy  yield  ?  " 

The   same   note    was  struck  by  Churchill  in  the  first 
year  of  the  reign  of  George  III. : 

"  May  not  some  great  extensive  genius  raise 
The  name  of  Britain  'bove  Athenian  praise  ?  .  .  . 
There  may — there  hath — and  Shakespeare's  muse  aspires 
Beyond  the  reach  of  Greece  :  with  native  fires 
Mounting  aloft,  he  wings  his  daring  flight, 
Whilst  Sophocles  below  stands  trembling  at  his  height. 
Why  should  we  then  abroad  for  judges  roam, 
When  abler  judges  we  may  find  at  home  ? 
Happy  in  tragic  and  in  comic  powers 
Have  we  not  Shakespeare  ?  is  not  Jonson  ours  ?  " 

We  have  quoted  enough  to  show  that  the  poets  of  the 
eighteenth  century,  from  beginning  to  end  of  what  has 
been  called  the  darkest  period  of  the  century,  were  not, 
in  principle  at  least,  enamoured  of  tameness  and  trimness 
in  art,  and  that  they  did  not  of  set  choice  and  with  de- 
liberate acquiescence  confine  themselves  to  a  low  range 
of  imaginative  effort.  Rather  they  seem  to  have  been 
strivkig  and  straining  with  turbulent  ambition  after 
higher  things — after  things  too  high  for  their  powers. 
Gray,  who  had  more  right  to  speak  than  any  of  those 
whom  we  have  quoted,  seems  to  have  been  conscious  of 
this  impotence,  this  disproportion  between  desire  and 
achievement. 


336  SUPPLEMENT 

"  But  not  to  one  in  this  benighted  age 
Is  that  diviner  inspiration  given, 
That  burns  in  Shakespeare's  and  in  Milton's  page, 
The  pomp  and  prodigality  of  heaven." 

The  difficulty  would  be  to  find  the  critics  whose 
authority"  the  minor  poets  resented  and  considered  it 
necessary  to  abjure.  Rymer,  who  is  sometimes  referred 
to  as  if  he  had  been  a  representative  critic  of  the  period, 
was  at  least  as  much  laughed  at  in  his  own  generation 
as  he  has  ever  been  since,  and  represented  only  a  per- 
verse and  splenetic  opposition  to  the  general  strain. 

The  inability  of  the  period  to  fulfil  its  aspirations 
after  a  larger  and  bolder  style  of  poetry,  with  more  of 
life  and  passion  in  it,  would  be  almost  pathetic  if  it  were 
really  required  of  every  generation  to  be  great  in  poetry, 
and  it  were  to  be  held  dishonor  to  come  short  of  great- 
ness in  the  divine  art.  The  tyrannical  authority  of  a 
critical  school  cannot  be  held  responsible  for  this  dis- 
honor to  the  generation  after  Pope,  if  dishonor  it  be. 
The  only  respect  in  which  criticism  may  have  had  a  dis- 
couraging influence  was  this,  that  there  was  so  much  of 
it.  Under  the  lead  of  Johnson  the  great  aim  of  criti- 
cism was  to  discover  how  the  heart  was  reached,  to  de- 
tect by  analysis  of  an  impressive  passage  what  helped 
and  what  hindered  the  effect.  "You  must  show  how 
terror  is  impressed  on  the  human  heart,"  he  said,  in 
speaking  with  his  friends  of  what  a  critic  ought  to  do  in 
considering  the  use  made  of  a  ghost  in  a  play  :  this  was 
the  only  kind  of  criticism  that  he  would  call  real  criti- 
cism, "showing  the  beauty  of  thought  as  formed  on  the 
workings  of  the  human  heart."  Now,  when  an  artist 
begins  to  consider  too  curiously  how  an  effect  is  pro- 
duced, he  is  apt  to  be  hampered  and,  it  may  be,  para- 
lyzed if  he  has  not  energy  enough  to  transcend  the  con- 
sciously or  painfully  analytic  stage,  or  to  perform  his 
analysis  with  such  swiftness  and  sureness  of  perception 
that  he  proceeds  at  once  and  as  if  by  instinct  to  the 


THE    SUPPOSED    TYEANNY    OF   POPE  337 

required  combination.  The  amount  of  poetic  produc- 
tion in  the  generation  after  Pope  may  have  been  les- 
sened by  excess  of  the  critical  spirit  and  the  multiplica- 
tion of  negative  conditions,  but  this  could  have  affected 
only  the  minor  poets  or  men  of  poetic  talent,  because  the 
man  of  poetic  genius  will  not  and  need  not  consider  his 
ways  and  means  too  curiously. 

How  are  we  to  account  for  the  arrest  of  poetry  in  the 
eighteenth  century,  if  it  was  not  due  to  the  chilling 
influence  of  critics  imbued  with  artificial  principles  ? 
Burke's  aphorism  that  "  the  march  of  the  human  mind 
is  slow,"  is  a  part  of  the  explanation  that  should  not  be 
lost  sight  of  in  the  search  for  minute  causes.  Leaps  and 
bounds  of  poetic  expansion  are  not  to  be  expected  in 
every  generation.  Slow  progress  is  the  normal  law,  and 
we  need  not  torture  ourselves  to  discover  reasons  for  a 
particular  case  of  slow  progress,  as  if  it  were  something 
exceptional.  After  all,  there  was  some  progress  even  in 
poetry  itself,  besides  what  may  have  been  done  in  the 
way  of  suggestion  and  collection  of  material  for  the 
poetry  of  the  future.  Collins  and  Gray  are  great 
names,  though  not  of  the  first  rank  ;  and  even  in  the 
darkest  period  such  minor  bards  as  the  Wartons,  Shen- 
stone,  and  Beattie  did  not  merely  grind  old  tunes,  but 
sounded  a  distinctive  note,  however  humble.  Collins, 
in  especial,  added  an  ever-living  branch  to  the  tree  of 
our  literature  :  his  Odes  are  not  mere  dry  twigs  on  that 
tree.  Of  the  peculiar  form  in  which  he  expressed  the 
rapture  of  learned  meditation,  gathering  together  the 
most  moving  incidents  of  human  experience  under  ab- 
stractions conceived  as  living  forces,  Collins  is  the 
one  great  master.  He  is  essentially  a  scholarly  or 
academic  poet,  and  could  never  be  popular  in  the  wide 
sense,  his  subjects  being  historical  and  his  mode  of 
expression  such  that  he  cannot  be  followed  without 
some  intellectual  effort ;  but  the  effort  is  worth  making, 
because  he  had  deep  and  genuine  feeling  to  put  into  his 


338  SUPPLEMENT 

verse,  and  the  power  to  transmit  that  feeling,  whole  and 
harmonious,  to  the  reader.  One  of  Wordsworth's  cen- 
tral qualities,  his  attitude  toward  Nature,  is  a  natural 
and  easy  transition  from  the  spirit  in  which  Collins  con- 
ceived the  pageant  of  history. 

Great  bursts  of  poetic  activity  come  but  seldom. 
They  are  exceptional  facts  ;  and  those  anxious  rerum 
cognoscere  causas  should  first  endeavor  to  determine  the 
causes  or  leading  conditions  of  those  departures  from 
the  normal  law.  It  should  be  an  easier  task,  and  should 
conduce  to  the  understanding  of  the  comparative  inac- 
tivity of  other  periods.  If  we  take  the  works  of  the 
leaders  of  the  great  poetic  revival  of  this  century, — 
Wordsworth,  Scott,  and  Byron, — we  find  that  they  differ 
in  certain  broad  respects  from  all  the  works  of  the 
eighteenth  century.  We  find  something  like  the  origi- 
nation of  new  species  or  new  varieties  in  poetry.  The 
form,  in  a  large  sense  of  the  word,  is  new,  and  the  vein 
of  feeling  is  new.  New  themes  are  treated  in  a  new 
way,  and  with  a  new  spirit.  Consider  the  mere  form  of 
the  "  Lay  of  the  Last  Minstrel,"  the  first  genuinely 
popular  poem,  interesting  to  all  classes,  of  the  new  era — 
a  metrical  romance  regularly  constructed,  with  perfect 
unity  of  action,  incidents  all  helping  forward  the  prog- 
ress of  the  story  through  various  complications  to 
a  catastrophe.  No  such  poem  had  ever  been  written 
before  ;  it  was  a  new  form  in  poetry — classical  regu- 
larity of  form  combined  with  romantic  freedom  of  acci- 
dent. The  precepts  of  the  classical  school,  reiterating 
how  an  epic,  the  vain  ambition  of  the  poets  of  the 
eighteenth  century,  ought  to  be  constructed,  were  not 
thrown  away  upon  Scott,  although  he  made  a  free  use 
of  them.  Then  the  spirit  of  the  poem — the  serious  epic 
treatment  of  the  necromancing  Ladye  of  Branksome 
Hall,  the  Wizard,  the  Goblin  Page,  and  the  bold  Moss- 
trooper. We  have  nothing  like  this  in  the  eighteenth 
century.     In  Pope's  time  such  personages  would  either 


THE   SUPPOSED   TYRANNY    OF   POPE  339 

have  been  burlesqued  or  treated  with  affected  respect, 
such  as  a  grown-up  person  would  use  toward  fairies  and 
hobgoblins  in  telling  stories  about  them  to  a  child. 
They  might  have  figured  in  an  Ode  to  Superstition,  but 
an  artist  would  hardly  have  dared  to  narrate  their 
doings  with  the  air  of  a  serious  believer,  and  without 
taking  the  polite  reader  into  his  confidence.  Taken 
altogether,  in  form  and  spirit,  the  "  Lay  "  was  a  new 
thing  in  literature,  a  new  species  of  poem.  The  same 
may  be  said  of  "  Childe  Harold."  Here  also  we  find  a 
new  species  of  epic,  such  as  the  formal  writers  of  epic 
poetry  had  never  contemplated — the  hero  of  which  is 
not  a  mythical  king  like  Arthur,  or  a  personified  Virtue 
moving  in  Faeryland  like  Spenser's  Red  Cross  Knight, 
or  Guyon,  or  Britomart,  but  a  modern  man  moving  in 
modern  scenes.  Wordsworth  also  is  new  in  form  as 
well  as  in  spirit.  No  poet  before  him  had  dared  to  shut 
himself  up  in  the  countiy  and  choose  as  the  subject  of 
his  verse,  without  any  reference  to  his  fine  friends  in 
town,  his  own  personal  feelings  and  reflections  as 
aroused  by  the  moving  spectacle  of  sky  and  hill  and 
glen,  and  the  homely  life  of  rustic  neighbors.  He 
wrote  a  species  of  pastoral  poetry  that  had  not  been 
legislated  for  by  the  technical  lawgivers  of  the  art, 
though  the  want  of  it  had  been  vaguely  felt  by  Walsh 
when  he  wrote  wistfully  of  a  Golden  Age  in  which  "  the 
shepherds  were  men  of  learning  and  refinement." 

Whether  or  not  these  are  the  main  characters  of  the 
new  poetry,  the  vital  principles  underlying  smaller  dif- 
ferences, it  is  in  such  large  new  features  that  we  must 
seek  the  secret  of  the  great  expansion  rather  than  in 
little  changes  of  artistic  aim  or  conscious  repudiation 
of  definite  critical  theories.  The  fetters  that  had  to 
be  broken  were  nothing  so  palpable  as  formal  rules  of 
critical  authority.  They  were  bonds  from  which  eman- 
cipation is  much  less  easy,  the  restraints  of  unformu- 
lated, undogmatic,  inarticulate  custom.     It  was  habits 


340  SUPPLEMENT 

of  feeling  that  had  to  be  changed,  not  rules  of  art.  And 
the  reason  of  the  comparative  poverty  of  the  poetry  of 
the  eighteenth  century  was  that  no  poet  was  born  or 
bred  with  sufficient  force  of  personality  to  effect  this 
change.  Probably  it  could  not  have  been  effected  with- 
out the  invention  of  forms  of  poetry  that  had  the  broad 
characters  of  new  species,  so  inveterately  were  the  old 
habits  of  feeling  associated  with  the  old  forms,  drama, 
epic,  descriptive  poem,  ode,  elegy,  and  sonnet,  each  hav- 
ing its  established  unwritten  standard  of  poetic  elegance 
or  refinement.  It  is  only  when  some  distinctively  new 
kind  of  thing  is  reached  by  happy  inspiration  that 
creative  energy  is  exalted  to  the  pitch  that  results  in  a 
great  period  of  poetry. 

The  eighteenth  century,  possibly  because  the  time 
was  not  ripe,  had  not  inventive  energy  enough  in  poetry 
to  strike  out  new  lines,  but  it  contributed  in  many  ways 
to  make  expansion  easier  for  those  that  came  after. 
Especially  did  the  rich  and  varied  development  of  prose 
in  essay  and  fiction  prepare  the  way  for  the  subsequent 
emancipation.  The  influence  of  this  prose  as  a  solvent 
of  established  poetic  customs  has  not  been  sufficiently  re- 
marked. Fifty  years  ago  the  popular  conception  of  this 
revolution  was  that  it  was  a  literary  echo  of  the  French 
Revolution  ;  that  throughout  the  eighteenth  century 
jioets  had  bent  submissively  under  the  yoke  of  Pope  and 
the  classical  school,  but  that,  catching  the  heat  of  the 
political  ferment,  they  were  emboldened  to  raise  the 
standard  of  rebellion  and  throw  the  rules  of  their  tyrant  to 
the  winds.  But  the  example  of  freedom  from  traditional 
standards  of  dignity  set  by  prose  works  of  imagination 
and  prose  comments  on  life  had  much  more  to  do  with 
the  poetic  revolution  than  the  contemporary  political 
excitement,  though  this  also  may  have  been  a  factor  in 
the  result.  The  serious  Muse  sat  in  stiff  and  starched 
propriety  while  her  nimbler  sister  revelled  in  the  enjoy- 
ment of  freedom,  but  she  tired  at  last  of  nursing  her 


THE    SUPPOSED    TYRANNY    OF   POPE  341 

dignity,  and  unbent.  Prose  writers  had  familiarized 
the  world  with  the  subjects  and  sentiments  of  the  new 
poetry  for  a  generation  or  two  before  they  attained  the 
intensity  that  seeks  expression  in  verse.  The  emanci- 
pating influence  of  the  prose  literature  becomes  obvious 
when,  disregarding  their  individualities,  we  look  at  the 
general  strain  of  the  pioneers  and  the  leaders  of  the 
poetic  revolution.  Cowper  might  be  described  with 
general  truth  as  an  essayist  in  verse.  Wordsworth 
deliberately  and  articulately  claimed  liberty  to  use  in 
verse  the  same  diction  that  might  be  used  for  the 
expression  of  the  same  feelings  in  prose  ;  and  incidents 
such  as  he  made  the  subject  of  his  lyrical  ballads  had 
for  long  been  considered  admissible  material  for  the 
novelist.  Characters  and  incidents  similar  in  kind  to 
those  in  Scott's  metrical  romrfnces  had  made  their 
appearance  before  in  prose  romance.  Byron's  "  Childe 
Harold "  was  avowedly  suggested  by  a  character  in 
prose  fiction  ;  he  intended  his  hero,  he  said,  to  be  a 
kind  of  poetical  Zeluco.  Prose  thus  led  the  way  to 
greater  freedom  of  subject  and  sentiment  in  poetry,  and 
matured  the  ideas  to  which  poetry  gave  the  higher 
artistic  expression. 

It  is  of  some  importance  that  we  should  understand 
the  real  nature  of  the  last  poetic  revival,  and  see  that 
there  was  more  in  it  than  a  revolt  against  established 
poetic  diction  and  artificial  critical  rules.  This  oppro- 
brious word  artificial  has  been  allowed  too  long  to  cre- 
ate a  false  prejudice  against  the  poetry  of  the  eigh- 
teenth century.  It  may  be  doubted  whether  in  any 
important  sense  of  the  word  the  best  poetry  of  the 
eighteenth  century  was  more  artificial  than  the  best 
poetry  of  the  nineteenth.  The  undiscriminating  con- 
tempt that  at  one  time  sought  to  justify  itself  by  this 
vague  term  of  reproach,  and  that  was  natural  enough  in 
the  exultation  of  a  new  movement,  has  now  all  but 
passed  away,  and  has  given  place  to  a  feeling  that,  after 


342  SUPPLEMENT 

all,  the  poets  of  the  eighteenth  century  may  be  worthy  of 
study  by  those  ambitious  of  still  further  developments. 
And  who  knows  but  that  in  this  once  despised  period 
inventive  genius  may  yet  find  a  hint  and  a  starting-point 
for  fresh  triumphs  ? 


Ill 

THE    HISTORICAL   RELATIONSHIPS   OF    BURNS 

The  old  conception  of  the  Ayrshire  ploughman-poet 
undoubtedly  was  that  his  poetry  had  no  historical  con- 
nection ;  that  it  stands  apart  as  a  unique  phenomenon, 
entirely  unconnected  with  the  main  stream  of  English 
poetry  ;  that  the  peasant-poet  owed  every  thing  to 
nature,  and  nothing  to  books  ;  that  he  was  a  high-priest 
of  poetry,  without  literary  father  or  mother,  raised  up 
by  nature  herself  ab  initio  amidst  the  most  disadvan- 
tageous circumstances,  as  if  to  put  to  shame  man's  feeble 
calculations  of  means  to  ends  in  literary  culture.  This 
was  the  old  conception,  people  finding  it  difficult  to 
understand  how  a  ploughman  could  have  trained  him- 
self to  be  a  great  poet.  I  do  not  know  how  far  this 
conception  still  prevails  ;  but  as  something  very  like  it 
is  to  be  found  in  the  famous  essay  on  Burns  by  another 
great  Scotchman  of  genius,  Thomas  Carlyle,  and  as  it 
harmonizes  with  our  natural  desire  to  have  an  element 
of  the  miraculous  in  our  saints  and  heroes,  it  has  prob- 
ably survived  all  the  plain  facts  set  forth  by  the  poet's 
biographers.  There  is  in  the  conception  this  much 
obvious  truth  :  that  Burns  owed  little  to  school  and 
nothing  to  college  ;  but  when  it  is  said  that  nature,  and 
nature  only,  was  his  school-master  (unless  the  word  is 
used  in  a  sense  sufficiently  wide  to  include  the  works  of 
man,  and  among  them  that  work  of  man  called  litera- 
ture), the  theory  does  injustice  to  Burns  as  an  artist, 
and  is  at  variance  with  the  plain  facts  of  his  life. 

Supreme  excellence  in  poetry  is  never  attained  by  a 
sudden  leap  up  from  the  level  of  common  ideas  and 

343 


344  SUPPLEMENT 

common  speech,  whether  a  man's  e very-day  neighbors  are 
rustic,  or  men  and  women  of  art  and  fashion  and  cul- 
ture. The  world  in  which  his  imagination  moves  is 
never  entirely  of  his  own  creation.  The  great  poet 
must  have  had  pioneers  from  whom  he  derived  some  of 
the  ideas  and  resources  of  his  craft — enough,  at  least,  to 
feed  and  stimulate  and  direct  his  own  inborn  energy. 
Burns,  in  truth,  was  a  self-taught  genius  only  in  the 
sense  in  which  all  great  artists  are  so  ;  those  who  see  in 
the  Ayrshire  ploughman's  mastery  of  the  poetic  art  any 
rarer  miracle  than  this  are  those  only  who  attach  an 
exaggerated  importance  to  what  schools  and  colleges  can 
do  in  furthering  the  highest  efforts  of  human  genius. 
Beyond  a  certain  point,  as  we  all  know,  every  man  must 
be  his  own  school-master  ;  in  this  sense  nature  was  the 
school-master  of  Burns.  But,  all  the  same,  his  poetry  is 
not  an  isolated  creation,  entirely  disconnected  from  the 
main  body  of  literature.  It  has  its  own  individuality, 
as  the  work  of  all  great  artists  must  have  ;  but  it  had  a 
literary  origin,  as  much  as  the  poetry  of  Chaucer  or 
Shakespeare,  or  even  Pope.  When  nature  has  done  her 
work,  and  the  unexpected  has  happened,  it  is  generally 
easy  to  find  something  very  natural  in  the  means  she 
has  used  to  bring  the  unexpected  to  pass  ;  and  the  very 
circumstances  that  seemed  at  first  sight  to  be  disadvan- 
tageous to  Burns  are  now  seen  to  have  favored  him  in 
the  fulfilment  of  his  mission. 

For  a  work  of  genius  we  require  first  of  all  a  man  of 
genius  ;  but  there  are  conditions  that  render  the  exer- 
cise  of  his  genius  possible,  and  there  are  influences  that 
modify  the  character  and  the  direction  of  his  work. 
And  in  the  case  of  literary  work  these  conditions  and 
influences  are  generally  found  in  antecedent  literature, 
though  not  necessarily  in  the  literature  of  the  language 
in  which  the  artist  works — literature  having  really  an 
international  unity.  The  course  of  literature  is  mainly 
self-contained  ;  and,  in  reading  its  history,  the  impulse 


THE    HISTORICAL    RELATIONSHIPS    OF    BURNS        345 

to  great  work  in  one  generation  may  often  be  traced 
back  to  dimly  conceived  aims  and  blind  and  imperfect 
performances  in  a  previous  generation.  Nature  begins 
her  preparations  for  the  advent  of  a  great  man  long 
before  he  makes  his  appearance. 

It  is  interesting,  and  it  strengthens  our  sense  of  the 
unity  of  literature  from  generation  to  generation,  to 
trace  back  in  this  way  the  movement  that  culminated  in 
the  poetry  of  Burns  to  a  very  humble  episode  in  the 
English  poetry  of  Queen  Anne's  time — a  passing  fashion 
for  writing  what  is  called  pastoral  poetry,  and  a  quarrel 
on  the  subject  among  the  more  celebrated  wits  of  the 
day.  The  fashion  had  prevailed  for  some  time  before  in 
France  ;  in  England  the  starting-point  was  Dryden's 
translation  of  Virgil's  "  Eclogues."  To  this  translation 
was  prefixed  an  elegant  discourse  on  pastoral  poetry 
in  general  by  William  Walsh,  Esq.,  a  gentleman  of  wit 
and  fashion,  who  wrote  in  a  very  neat  and  pointed  style, 
subjected  the  views  of  the  Frenchman  Fontenelle  to 
delicate  and  polite  ridicule,  and  submitted  to  the  public 
with  great  spirit  and  elegance  his  own  views  of  what 
pastoral  poetry  ought  to  be.  Mr.  Walsh's  ideal  was  of 
the  most  artificial  kind,  his  poetical  shepherds  being 
men  of  a  golden  age,  when  grazing  was  the  chief  in- 
dustry, and  shepherds  were,  as  he  put  it,  men  of  learn- 
ing and  refinement,  and  his  chief  rules  being  that  an 
air  of  piety  should  pervade  the  pastoral  poem,  that  the 
characters  should  represent  the  ancient  innocent  and 
unpractised  plainness  of  the  golden  age,  and  that  the 
scenery  should  be  truly  pastoral — a  beautiful  landscape, 
and  shepherds,  with  their  flocks  round  them,  piping 
under  wide-spreading  beech-trees.  Pastoral  poetry,  as 
conceived  by  Mr.  Walsh,  who  spoke  the  taste  of  his  age, 
was  a  species  of  elegant  trifling,  something  like  the 
recent  fancy  for  old  French  forms  of  verse  (ballades, 
roudeaus,  villanelles,  and  so  forth),  and  nothing  might 
have  come  of  it  ;  but  it  so  happened  that  Mr.  Walsh 


346  SUPPLEMENT 

was  the  earliest  literary  friend  and  counsellor  of  young 
Mr.  Pope,  who  was  persuaded  to  make  his  first  essay  as 
a  poet  in  pastorals,  written  in  strict  accordance  with 
Walsh's  principles,  and  of  that  came  important  conse- 
quences. Pope  published  in  1709,  in  a  miscellany  of 
Dodsley's  ;  in  the  same  volume  appeared  also  pastorals 
from  the  pen  of  Ambrose  Philips.  Philips,  known  as 
Namby  Pamby,  belonged  to  the  coterie  of  Addison  and 
Steele.  Between  that  coterie  and  Pope  arose  jealousy 
and  strife  ;  hence  when,  four  years  later,  Pope  produced 
his  "  Windsor  Forest,"  there  appeared  in  the  Guar- 
dian, the  organ  of  the  coterie  (April,  1713,  is  the  date), 
a  series  of  articles  on  pastoral  poetry,  in  which  Steele 
incidentally  gave  a  roll  to  the  log  of  friend  Namby 
Pamby,  who  was  named  as  the  equal  of  Theocritus  and 
Virgil,  and  ridiculed,  by  implication,  in  a  polite  Queen 
Anne  manner,  the  pastoral  poems  of  young  Mr.  Pope, 
without  mentioning  his  name.  This  at  least  was  the 
construction  put  upon  the  matter  by  Pope,  who  took  a 
clever  and  amusing  revenge  of  a  kind  to  cause  a  great 
deal  of  talk  about  the  Guardian  articles.  It  was  an 
amusing  literary  quarrel ;  but  Steele's  theory  of  pastoral 
poetry,  thus  occasionally  produced,  had  more  fruitful 
results.  The  numbers  of  the  Guardian  really  set  forth 
for  the  first  time  a  fresh  theory  for  that  kind  of  compo- 
sition, to  the  effect  that  in  English  pastoral  poetry  the 
characters  should  be  not  classical  shepherds  and  shep- 
herdesses,— Corydon  and  Phyllis,  Tityrus  and  Amaiyllis, 
— but  real  English  rustics  ;  that  the  scenery  should  be 
real  English  scenery  ;  and  that  the  manners  and  super- 
stitions should  be  such  as  are  to  be  found  in  English 
rural  life. 

Nothing  was  done  to  realize  this  theory  in  England 
till  the  time  of  Crabbe  and  Wordsworth  (Gay  merely 
burlesqued  it  in  his  "Shepherd's  Week"),  but  it  so  hap- 
pened that  it  was  taken  seriously  in  Scotland.  At  the 
time  when  the  Guardian  articles  appeared   there  was 


THE    HISTORICAL   RELATIONSHIPS    OP   BURNS        347 

a  social  club  in  Edinburgh,  named  The  Easy  Club, 
which  followed  the  literary  movements  of  London  with 
keen  interest ;  and  of  this  club  Allan  Ramsay  was  poet- 
laureate.  Allan  also  wrote  pastoral  elegies  d  la  mode, 
neither  better  nor  worse  than  the  artificial  stuff  then  in 
fashion  ;  but  in  a  happy  hour  he  thought  of  trying  his 
hand  at  the  real  pastoral,  as  conceived  by  Steele,  and 
produced  "The  Gentle  Shepherd."  Thus,  out  of  a 
passing  literary  fashion  and  a  literary  quarrel  came  the 
original  impulse  to  the  composition  of  a  work  that  must 
be  numbered  among  the  conditions  that  made  the  poetry 
of  Burns  possible.  For  no  less  honor  than  this  can  be 
claimed  for  Ramsay's  pastoral  comedy.  Carlyle  says 
somewhere  that  a  man  of  genius  is  always  impossible 
until  he  appears.  This  is  quite  true,  but  it  is  only  a 
half  truth  ;  and  the  other  half  is  that  a  man  of  genius 
must  always  be  possible  before  he  appears.  Favorable 
conditions  for  the  exercise  of  his  genius  will  not  produce 
the  man  ;  but  if  the  favorable  conditions  are  not  there 
when  he  appears,  his  genius  will  be  stifled,  and  he  will 
remain  mute  and  inglorious. 

Ramsay's  "  Gentle  Shepherd  "  became,  in  the  genera- 
tion before  Burns,  one  of  the  most  popular  books  among 
the  peasantry  of  Scotland,  finding  a  place,  it  is  said, 
beside  the  Bible  in  every  ploughman's  cottage  and  shep- 
herd's sheilling  ;  and  it  may  be  said  to  have  created  the 
atmosphere  in  which  the  genius  of  Burns  thrived  and 
grew  to  such  proportions.  It  did  this  by  idealizing  rural 
life  in  Scotland,  by  giving  the  ploughman  a  status  in 
the  world  of  the  imagination.  It  enabled  him,  as  it 
were,  to  hold  his  head  higher  among  his  fellow-creatures, 
and  opened  his  eyes  to  the  elements  of  poetry  in  his 
hard,  earth-stained,  and  weather-beaten  existence.  "  His 
rustic  friend,"  Carlyle  says,  in  speaking  of  Burns  and 
the  boundless  love  that  was  in  him,  "  his  nut-brown 
maiden,  are  no  longer  mean  and  homely,  but  a  hero  and 

a   queen,  to  be   ranked  with  the  paragons  of  earth." 
26 


348  SUPPLEMENT 

But  it  was  Ramsay  who  first  threw  the  golden  light  of 
poetry  on  the  peasant  lads  and  lasses  of  Scotland,  and 
made  heroes  and  heroines  of  Patie  and  Roger  and  Jenny 
and  Peggy,  and  who  thus  created  the  atmosphere 
through  which  Burns  saw  them.  No  more  striking 
proof  of  the  power  of  literature  to  transform  life  can  be 
given  than  the  fact  that  half  a  century  before  the  advent 
of  Burns  he  was  preceded  by  an  ideal  prototype  in  "  The 
Gentle  Shepherd."  Ramsay's  description  of  his  hero 
might  pass  for  a  description  of  the  real  Burns,  only  that 
nature  asserted  her  supremacy  by  making  the  reality 
more  astonishing  than  any  thing  that  the  imagination  of 
Ramsay,  governed  as  it  was  by  the  genteel  spirit  of  the 
time,  had  dared  to  put  into  verse. 

Burns  owed  much  to  Allan  Ramsay,  and  something 
also  to  another  Scottish  poet,  to  whom  he  erected  a 
memorial  stone  in  Canongate  Churchyard,  Edinburgh — 
the  ill-fated  Fergusson  ;  but  to  say,  with  Carlyle,  that 
he  had  "  for  his  only  standard  of  beauty  the  rhymes  of 
Ramsay  and  Fergusson  "  is  to  miss  altogether  his  true 
relation  to  the  main  body  of  English  literature.  His 
only  standard  of  beauty  !  This  is  indeed  to  underrate 
the  extent  of  the  ploughman's  self-education.  I  need 
hardly  remind  you  of  the  studious  habits  of  the  Burns 
family,  upon  which  all  his  biographers  dwell  ;  how  their 
severe  rule  of  bodily  labor  was  combined  with  a  rule  of 
mental  labor  no  less  strictly  and  strenuously  observed 
because  it  was  voluntary  ;  how  they  carried  books  in 
their  pockets  to  read  whenever  their  hands  were  free 
from  farm-work  ;  how  neighbors  found  them  at  their 
meals  with  spoon  in  one  hand  and  book  in  the  other. 
There  is  nothing,  indeed,  that  impresses  us  more  with  a 
sense  of  the  gigantic  force  of  the  personality  of  Burns 
and  the  breadth  of  his  manhood  than  the  thought  that 
with  all  the  strength  of  his  youthful  passion  for  reading, 
tending,  as  it  did,  to  detach  him  from  his  unlettered 
neighbors,  it  should  not  have  converted  him  into  a  self- 


THE    HISTORICAL   RELATIONSHIPS    OF    BURNS        349 

opinionated  prig  or  a  snarling  pedant.  What  saved 
him  from  this  fate  was  that  he  absorbed  books,  and  was 
not  absorbed  by  them  ;  he  was  saved,  probably,  by  that 
craving  for  distinction  of  which  he  spoke  more  than 
once  as  his  ruling  passion,  that  thirst  for  admiring  sym- 
pathy of  living  men  and  living  women  which  made  him 
appropriate  and  turn  to  his  own  uses  what  he  found  in 
books.  That,  probably,  saved  him  from  having  loads 
of  learned  lumber  in  his  head.  However  this  may  be, 
the  actual  result  was  that  Burns  in  those  early  years  of 
intense  and  devouring  study,  ranging  far  beyond  Ram- 
say and  Fergusson,  trained  himself  to  be  a  great  artist  by 
mastering  and  rendering  to  harmonious  practice  the  best 
critical  ideas  of  his  century. 

The  secret  of  Burns's  enduring  and  still  growing 
fame  is  that  he  was  the  greatest  poetic  artist  of  his 
century  ;  and  I  would  submit  the  proposition  that  he 
was  so,  not  because  he  stood  outside  the  main  current 
of  his  century,  and  drew  his  inspiration  solely  from 
nature,  meaning  by  nature  untutored  impulse,  but 
because  he  took  into  his  mind  from  books,  and  succeeded 
by  the  force  of  his  genius  and  the  happy  accident  of  his 
position  in  reconciling  two  elementary  principles  of 
poetry  that  weaker  intellects  cannot  keep  from  drifting 
into  antagonism  and  mutual  injury.  One  of  these  prin- 
ciples is  that  with  which  we  are  familiar  in  eighteenth- 
century  literature,  under  the  name  of  "  correctness," 
which  is  only  another  name  for  perfection  of  expression, 
in  so  far  as  that  can  be  attained  by  laborious  self- 
criticism.  When  Pope  began  to  write,  he  was  advised 
by  his  friend  Walsh,  to  whom  I  have  already  referred, 
to  aim  at  correctness  :  the  ancients  had  said  every  thing, 
and  there  was  nothing  left  for  the  modern  poet  but  to 
improve  upon  their  manner  of  saying  it.  In  his  "  Essay 
on  Criticism  "  Pope  embodied  this  idea  in  a  couplet  : 

"  True  wit  is  nature  to  advantage  dressed, 
What  oft  was  thought,  but  ne'er  so  well  expressed." 


350  SUPPLEMENT 

This  is  one  principle  ;  the  other  is  that  art  must  follow 
nature.  It  is  a  common  opinion  that  the  eighteenth-cen- 
tury poets  were  alive  only  to  the  first  of  these  principles. 
But  this  will  not  bear  examination  ;  the  sovereignty 
of  nature  was  formally  proclaimed  by  Pope,  as  well  as 
the  artistic  doctrine  of  dressing  her  to  advantage  : 

"  First  follow  nature,  and  your  judgment  frame 
By  her  just  standard,  which  is  still  the  same  : 
Unerring  nature,  still  divinely  bright, 
Oue  clear,  unchanged,  and  universal  light, 
Life,  force,  and  beauty,  must  to  all  impart, 
At  once  the  source,  and  end,  and  test  of  art." 

This  was  Pope's  theory,  and  in  the  generation  between 
Pope  and  Burns  the  importance  of  following  nature  and 
the  vanity  of  artificial  rules  were  insisted  on  with 
untiring  enthusiasm  by  poets  and  critics  alike.  But  till 
Burns  arose  no  poetic  aspirant  was  found,  with  the 
doubtful  exception  of  Collins,  capable  of  reconciling 
the  conflicting  claims  of  nature  and  art  in  practice. 
Gray  was  stifled  by  too  fastidious  a  desire  for  correct- 
ness ;  Thomson,  Akenside,  Shenstone,  and  the  Wartons 
had  abundant  enthusiasm  for  nature,  but  insufficient  art. 
It  was  not,  indeed,  their  poetic  principles  that  undid  the 
correct  school ;  it  was  rather  the  artificial  taste,  the  fear 
of  vulgarity,  the  liking  for  something  elevated  above 
the  vulgar  style,  among  the  audience  for  which  they 
wrote  ;  and  this  led  them  into  what  was  really  a  viola- 
tion of  Pope's  principle  of  aiming  at  what  oft  was 
thought,  induced  them  to  search  for  what  seldom  was 
thought,  and  to  avoid  what  was  never  expressed  in 
polite  society.  Burns  was  more  fortunate  in  his  audi- 
ence, although  he  worked  on  the  same  principles,  and 
found  both  warrant  and  guidance  in  Pope's  "Essay  on 
Criticism." 

At  first  sight  it  might  seem  that  Burns  was  all  on  the 
side  of  the  naturalists  : 


THE    HISTORICAL   RELATIONSHIPS    OF   BURNS        351 

"  Gie  me  ae  touch  o'  nature's  fire, 
That's  a'  the  learning  I  desire." 

This  aspiration  is  sometimes  quoted  as  if  it  distinguished 
Burns  from  his  artificial  eighteenth-century  predecessors, 
and  as  if  it  were  the  secret  of  his  greatness  ;  but  really 
there  is  nothing  singular  in  it  :  it  might  be  paralleled 
from  every  poet  and  poetaster  between  Pope  and  him- 
self. We  are  all  willing  to  throw  upon  nature  the  labor 
that  nature  requires  from  us.  It  was  not  the  touch  of 
nature's  fire  alone  that  made  Burns  the  great  artist  he 
was  ;  it  was  the  happy  combination  of  this  with  an 
indomitable  effort  after  perfection  of  expression.  That 
Burns  had  natural  fire  there  is  no  question  ;  every -body 
feels  it  in  his  poetry,  and  every-body  allows  that  the 
touch  of  nature's  fire  is  indispensable.  But  Burns  had 
courage  enough  to  recognize  that  the  possession  of 
natural  fire  did  not  absolve  him  from  the  necessity  of 
resolute  artistic  discipline  ;  and  his  distinction  lies  in 
this,  that  he  had  strength  enough  to  undergo  the  dis- 
cipline without  losing  his  hold  on  nature.  How  many 
of  his  songs  fulfil  in  substance  Pope's  ideal — 

"  What  oft  was  thought,  but  ne'er  so  well  expressed  " — 

"Auld  Lang  Syne,"  "Ye  Banks  and  Braes,"  "Scots 
wha  hae,"  "  John  Anderson,"  "  Tarn  Glen,"  "  Duncan 
Gray."  And  if  we  either  look  at  his  poems  in  relation 
to  the  works  of  his  predecessors,  or  study  his  recorded 
habits  of  composition,  it  is  easy  to  see  that  it  was  not 
by  trusting  to  natural  impulse  alone  that  he  attained 
this  perfection  of  expression.  "  It  is  an  excellent 
method  in  a  poet,"  he  says  in  one  of  his  letters,  "  and 
what  I  believe  every  poet  does,  to  place  some  favorite 
classic  author,  in  his  walks  of  stud}7-  and  composition, 
before  him  as  a  model."  This  was  obviously  his  own 
practice.  For  almost  every  one  of  his  poems  he  had  a 
precedent  in  general  form  as  well  as  in  metre  :  for 
"The    Twa     Dogs"    and    "Tam    o'  Shanter,"    Allan 


352  SUPPLEMENT 

Ramsay's  fables,  the  "  Twa  Books  "  and  "  The  Three 
Bonnets  "  ;  for  "  Hallowe'en,"  Fergusson's  "  Hallow 
Fair"  ;  for  "The  Cottar's  Saturday  Night,"  Fergusson's 
"  Farmer's  Ingle,"  and  so  on.  Even  for  his  interchange 
of  rhyming  epistles  with  brother  bards,  which  were 
dashed,  as  he  said,  "  clean  aff  loof,"  he  had  the  prec- 
edent of  Fergusson's  correspondence  with  J.  S.  It 
would  almost  seem  as  if  he  never  wrote  except  with 
some  precedent  in  his  eye,  therein  approving  himself  the 
genuine  child  of  the  critical  principles  and  practice  of 
Pope.  Not,  be  it  remembered,  that  he  kept  his  prec- 
edent before  him  for  servile  imitation  ;  it  was  before 
his  mind  rather  as  a  stimulating  rival,  to  be  beaten  on 
its  own  ground  by  superior  natural  force,  higher  art, 
or  happier  choice  of  theme.  There  is  no  better  way  of 
reviving  our  sense  of  the  force  of  Burns's  genius,  if  it 
should  happen  to  get  blunted  by  too  prolonged  famili- 
arity, than  putting  his  work  alongside  the  precedent  with 
which  it  competes.  He  did  not  waste  his  strength  in 
searching  for  new  types  or  strange  topics  ;  he  tried  to 
improve  upon  the  old.  "  I  have  no  doubt,"  he  wrote 
to  Dr.  Moore  (in  1789),  "but  the  knack,  the  aptitude, 
to  learn  the  Muses'  trade,  is  a  gift  bestowed  by  Him 
'  who  forms  the  secret  bias  of  the  soul '  ;  but  I  as 
firmly  believe  that  excellence  in  the  profession  is  the 
fruit  of  industry,  labor,  attention,  and  pains."  And  a 
description  by  himself  of  his  habits  at  the  age  of  sixteen 
gives  us  some  idea  of  the  kind  of  pains  that  lie  took, 
from  a  very  early  period,  in  his  self-education  to  the 
office  of  poet :  "A  collection  of  English  songs  was  my 
vacle  mecum.  I  pored  over  them  driving  my  cart,  or 
walking  to  labor,  song  by  song,  verse  by  verse  ;  care- 
fully noting  the  true,  tender,  or  sublime,  from  affecta- 
tion or  fustian."  There  we  see  the  artist  at  work, 
laboriously  building  up  for  himself  a  standard  of  per- 
fection in  expression,  and  boldly  applying  nature  as  the 
test  of  art. 


THE    HISTORICAL   RELATIONSHIPS    OF   BURNS        353 

Ten  years  later,  at  the  age  of  twenty-six,  in  the  win- 
ter of  1785,  stimulated  by  the  intention  of  "appearing 
in  the  public  character  of  an  author,"  Burns  poured 
forth  poem  after  poem  with  marvellous  rapidity;  and, 
seeing  that  much  of  his  best  work  was  produced  then, 
his  easy,  impetuous  speed  has  been  contrasted  with  the 
laborious  care  of  his  eighteenth-century  predecessors, 
and  it  has  been  supposed  that  this  speed  was  the  secret 
of  his  success.  But  those  who  argue  thus  forget  the 
long  previous  years  of  discipline  to  which  the  poet,  with 
all  his  ardor  of  imagination,  had  had  the  strength  of 
will  to  subject  himself.  In  the  same  way  we  are  apt  to 
marvel  at  the  ease  and  certainty  of  touch  of  a  rapid 
painter,  and  forget  the  pains  that  it  took  him  to  acquire 
such  mastery.  There  are  few  remains  of  Burns's  appren- 
tice work,  because  most  of  it  was  done  in  his  head  as  he 
followed  the  plough  or  walked  beside  his  cart,  or  strolled 
or  lay  in  his  scanty  leisure  on  banks  and  braes. 

But  it  is  possible  sometimes  to  trace  a  succession  of 
tries  with  a  favorite  idea,  till  at  last  he  found  a  perfectly 
satisfactory  setting  for  it.     The  line  : 

"  But  seas  between  us  braid  hae  roared  " — 

is  perfectly  balanced  in  its  place  in  "  Auld  Lang  Syne  " 
against  the  companion  line  : 

"  We  twa  hae  paidl't  in  the  burn." 

But  the  ocean's  roar  had  done  duty  in  more  than  one  of 
his  earlier  and  less  perfect  poems  before  it  was  happily 
settled  in  its  present  connection.  At  that  desperate 
crisis  in  his  life  when  he  proposed  to  expatriate  himself, 
and  took  a  passage  to  the  West  Indies,  he  addressed  the 
following  lines  to  Jean  Armour  : 

"  Though  mountains  rise  and  deserts  howl, 
And  oceans  roar  between, 
Yet  dearer  than  my  deathless  soul 
Still  will  I  love  my  Jean." 


354  SUPPLEMENT 

We  find  the  same  idea  in  another  poem  of  the  same 

date  : 

"  Will  ye  go  to  the  Indies,  my  Mary, 
And  leave  auld  Scotia's  shore  ? 
Will  ye  go  to  the  Indies,  my  Mary, 
Across  the  Atlantic's  roar  ?  " 

The  idea  occurs  in  still  another  poem,  also  written  about 
the  same  time  : 

"  From  thee,  Eliza,  I  must  go, 
And  from  my  native  shore  ; 
The  cruel  fates  between  us  throw 
A  boundless  ocean's  roar  ; 

"  But  boundless  oceans,  roaring  wide, 
Between  my  love  and  me, 
They  never,  never  can  divide 
My  heart  and  soul  from  thee." 

I  am  afraid  these  quotations  illustrate  rather  more  than 
the  poet's  artistic  practice  ;  but  they  show  at  least  that 
he  was  very  constant  as  an  artist,  if  not  as  a  man. 

Burns  not  only  studied  his  art  in  books,  and  measured 
himself  against  established  masters  with  resolute  emula- 
tion and,  we  may  well  believe,  a  glorious  joy  in  his  own 
powers,  but,  living  as  he  did  in  his  youth  from  morning 
till  night,  day  after  day,  in  a  world  of  the  imagination, 
with  books  for  his  constant  companions,  he  seems  to 
have  been  influenced  by  books  as  few  men  have  been  in 
his  whole  attitude  toward  life  and  his  leading  poetic 
themes.  He  carried  into  his  daily  intercourse  with  plain 
country-folk,  who  were  his  neighbors  under  the  real  sky, 
ideals  derived  from  this  artificial  world  ;  from  it  he 
drew  his  sustenance  ;  it  was  the  source  of  the  strength 
that  lay  behind  the  outward  man.  Mr.  Robert  Louis 
Stevenson,  in  one  of  his  "Familiar  Studies  of  Men  and 
Books,"  draws  an  artistically  harmonious  and  carefully 
finished  picture  of  Burns  as  Rab  the  Ranter,  imaging 
him   as   a  rustic  Don  Juan   or  an  Ayrshire  Theophile 


THE   HISTORICAL   RELATIONSHIPS    OF   BURNS        355 

Gautier.     It  is  recorded  that  the  farmer's  son  of  Lochlea 
had,  when  a  youth  of  twenty-one,  the  only  tied  hair  in 
the  parish  of  Tarbolton,  and  wore  a  plaid  of  a  particular 
color,  arranged  in  a  particular  manner  round  his  shoul- 
ders.    This  little  peculiarity  Mr.  Stevenson  happily  in- 
terprets as  a  sign  of  the  poet's  kinship  in  temperament 
with  the  self-reliant  artist,  who  is  not  averse  to  public 
attention,  but  rather  wishes  to  force  his  personality  on 
the    world.     The   comparison    with    Gautier   is   so   far 
happy  and  suggestive  that  it  puts  proper  emphasis  on 
the  artistic  side  of  the  poet's  nature  ;  it  keeps  us  from 
forgetting  that  the  Ayrshire  ploughman  was,  above  every 
thing,  an  artist,  and,  by  force  of  artistic  temperament 
and    habit,  not   a  little   of   a   poser.     Mr.    Stevenson's 
diagnosis  of  the  tied  hair  and  the  particular  plaid  as 
artistic  symptoms  is  good,  and  one  could  wish,  in  his 
review  of  Burns's  love  affairs  and  love-letters,  to  have  had 
more  of  the  same  happy  vein  of  interpretation — to  have 
had  more  of  the  artist  brought  into  prominence,  and  less 
of  the  professional  Don  Juan.     But  the  truth  is  that 
any  comparison  of  Burns  to  Don  Juan  or  the  magnifi- 
cent leaders  of  the  romantic  movement  in  France  is  ana- 
chronistic, and,  so  far,  misleading.     Though  these  had 
something  in  common  with  Burns,  they  were  later  devel- 
opments, with  marked  modifications  of  race  and  circum- 
stances ;  and  if  we  go  farther  back,  we  shall  find  not 
merely  parallels,  but  prototypes,  that  had  a  direct  influ- 
ence in   making  Burns  what  he  was.     Rab  the  Ranter, 
the  "rantin'  rovin'"  boy  that  was  born  of  the  poet's 
imagination  in  Kyle,  and  was  the  "  worser  spirit"  of  his 
conduct,  was  the  lineal  descendant  of  the  roaring  boys 
of  the  Elizabethan  time  and  the  swaggering  wits  and 
beaux  of  the  days  of  King  Charles  II.;  but  his  nearest 
relations  are  to  be  found  in  the  poetry  and  fiction  that 
held  the  literary  field  when  Burns  was  young.     Rab  the 
Ranter  is  first  cousin  to  Tom  Jones  and  Roderick  Ran- 
dom and  Charles  Surface,  and  was  probably  acquainted 


356  SUPPLEMENT 

with  his  relations  ;  his  own  immediate  parent  was,  as  I 
have  already  indicated,  the  hero  of  Allan  Ramsay's  pas- 
toral comedy,  "The  Gentle  Shepherd"  Patie,  a  rat- 
tleskull, 

"  A  very  deil  that  aye  maun  hae  his  will," 

a  king  among  his  fellows  by  virtue  of  a  natural  air  of 
superiority,  a  rhymer  and  a  singer,  bold  of  address,  glib 
of  tongue,  an  adept  in  chaffing  the  lasses,  irresistible  in 
his  arts  of  courtship,  but,  with  all  this,  a  student,  "read- 
ing fell  books  that  teach  him  meikle  skill,"  familiar 
with  Shakespeare  and  Ben  Jonson,  with  poems,  histories, 
and  plays — "  reading,"  as  Ramsay  says  in  his  homely 
phrase  : 

"  Reading  such  books  as  raise  a  peasant's  mind 
Above  a  lord's  that  is  not  so  inclined." 

All  the  roaring  boys  of  eighteenth-century  poetry  and 
fiction  are  distinguished  by  a  certain  goodness  of  heart, 
and  an  active  scorn  of  meanness  and  hypocrisy  ;  they 
have  strong  natural  affections  ;  they  are  full  of  com- 
punction for  the  victims  of  their  warm-blooded  reckless- 
ness. In  short,  they  are  all  believers  in  "  Rab's  "  ethical 
creed  : 

"  The  heart  aye's  the  part  aye 
That  keeps  us  richt  or  wrang." 

In  so  far  as  the  poet  was  a  rantin'  rovin'  Robin,  this 
was  his  literary  lineage  and  consanguinity.  But  the 
real  Burns  had  a  strain  in  him  that  would  not  permit 
him  to  be  a  light-hearted  roaring  boy.  Rab  the  Ranter 
represented  only  one  of  his  moods — a  mood  indulged 
rather  in  a  spirit  of  defiance  than  with  thorough  enjoy- 
ment, as  in  one  to  the  manner  born.  Burns  was  the 
son  of  the  pious  cottar  whose  Saturday  night  he  cele- 
brated, and  he  could  not  remain  long  at  ease  in  the  Zion 


THE    HISTORICAL   RELATIONSHIPS    OF   BURNS        357 

of  the  ranters,  however  heartily  he  let  himself  go,  and 
however  splendid  his  powers  of  expression  were  when 
he  was  in  the  vein.  He  was  the  author  of  the  addresses 
"  To  a  Mouse  "  and  "  To  a  Mountain  Daisy,"  as  well  as 
of  "Tarn  o'Shanter"  and  "The  Jolly  Beggars";  he 
was  the  "Man  of  Feeling,"  as  well  as  "  Rab  the  Ranter." 
One  of  his  most  marked  qualities  is  that  which  Carlyle 
expresses  with  such  eloquence  of  admiration,  his  large- 
hearted  sensibility,  his  boundless  love  of  mankind,  his 
warm  and  ready  sympathy  for  poor  outcast,  defenceless 
creatures  exposed  to  misfortune's  bitter  blast,  a  sym- 
pathy generous  enough  to  embrace  and  make  allowance 
for  even  the  enemies  of  the  well-conducted  animal 
world — the  prowling  wolf  and  the  devil  himself.  Herein, 
also,  Burns  was  not  singular  ;  here,  also,  we  find  him  the 
poet  of 

"  What  oft  was  thought,  but  ne'er  so  well  expressed  " 

in  his  time.     When  Burns  wrote,  sensibility  or  senti- 
mentality— tenderness  for  the  woes  of  the  unfortunate, 
especially  for  sufferings  that  could  not  be  relieved,  or 
for  which  no  relief  was  possible  but  a  compassionate 
tear — was,   and   had  been    for   several  years,  a    ruling 
fashion  in  literature.     Sensibility  was  a  favorite  virtue 
in  the  heroines,  and  even  in  the  heroes,  of  the  romances 
of    the    time.     Sterne's    "  Sentimental    Journey,"   and 
Mackenzie's  "  Man  of  Feeling,"  still  stand  out  among 
the  numerous  contemporary  writings  in  the  same  vein. 
"Dear  sensibility!"  cries  Sterne,  "source  inexhausted 
of  all  that  is  precious  in  our  jo}^s  or  costly  in  our  sor- 
rows !    .    .    .    Thou  givest  a  portion  of  it  sometimes  to  the 
roughest  peasant  who  traverses  the  bleakest  mountains. 
He  finds  the  lacerated  lamb  of  another's  flock.     This 
moment  I  behold  him,  leaning  with  his  head  against  his 
crook,  with  piteous  inclination,  looking  down  upon  it  ! 
'  Oh,  had  I  come  one  moment  sooner  ! '  "     Sterne  and 
Mackenzie  were  favorite  authors  with  Burns ;  he  wore 


358  SUPPLEMENT 

out  two  copies  of  "  The   Man  of  Feeling,"   carding 
it  about  in  his  pocket  to  read  at  odd  times. 

But  the  reader  may  ask,  Am  I  not  reducing  Burns, 
the  child  of  nature,  the  heaven-taught  poet,  to  a  mere 
creature  of  books?  Would  the  lad  that  was  born  in 
Kyle  not  have  been  a  "  rantin'  rovin' "  boy  all  the  same 
if  there  had  been  no  such  character  in  literature  to 
catch  his  imagination  and  sway  his  conduct  ?  Would 
he  not  have  been  a  "man  of  feeling  "if  Sterne  and 
Mackenzie  had  never  written  a  line  ?  Possibly ;  all 
that  I  suggest  is  that,  apart  from  any  question  of  what 
might  have  been,  books  did,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  influ- 
ence both  his  character  and  his  choice  of  poetical  themes. 
The  nature,  of  course,  must  have  been  there  before  he 
could  have  been  thus  influenced,  the  natural  affinity 
with  what  he  absorbed  from  books,  the  germ  that  the 
"  potency  of  life "  in  them,  to  use  Milton's  phrase, 
quickened  and  expanded.  That  Burns  would  have  felt 
pity  for  the  poor  mouse  whose  dwelling  had  been 
ruined  by  his  fell  ploughshare,  even  if  he  had  been 
absolutely  illiterate,  we  can  well  believe  ;  but  that  he 
would  have  written  a  poetic  address  to  the  mouse  if  he 
had  not  been  steeped  in  the  literature  of  sensibility  is 
open  to  question.  I  merely  afford  an  illustration  of  the 
truth  expressed  in  Fletcher  of  Saltoun's  famous  saying : 
"  Let  me  make  the  ballads  of  a  nation,  and  I  care  not 
who  makes  its  laws."  Only  Fletcher  spoke  of  popular 
music-hall  songs,  and  the  remark  admits  of  a  much 
wider  application — an  application  as  wide  as  Milton 
gave  it  in  his  "  Essay  on  the  Liberty  of  Unlicensed 
Printing":  "  For  books  are  not  absolutely  dead  things, 
but  doe  contain  a  potencie  of  life  in  them  to  be  as  active 
as  that  soule  was  whose  progeny  they  are  ;  nay,  they 
do  preserve  as  in  a  violl  the  purest  efficacie  and  extrac- 
tion of  that  living  intellect  that  bred  them.  .  .  As 
good  almost  kill  a  man  as  kill  a  good  book." 

I  do  not  mean  that  Burns  owed  every  thing  to  books. 


THE    HISTORICAL   RELATIONSHIPS    OP   BURNS        359 

In  virtue  of  his  artistic  temperament  he  was  peculiarly 
susceptible  to  influences  of  all  kinds,  to  ideas  current  in 
the  minds  of  living  men,  as  well  as  to  ideas  preserved 
in  books  ;  but  books  exercised  a  paramount  influence 
upon  him,  because  as  a  poet  or  artist  in  words  he,  more 
than  the  generality  of  men,  lived  and  moved  and  had 
his  being  in  the  atmosphere  of  books.  We  have  his 
own  direct  testimony  to  this,  even  if  it  was  not  to  be 
divined  from  his  artistic  temperament,  and  the  study  of 
his  works  in  relation  to  his  contemporaries. 

Take  an  example  or  two.  We  find  him  at  a  time 
when  things  were  not  going  well  with  him  writing  as 
follows  to  his  friend  Robert  Ainslie  : 

"  Let  me  quote  you  my  two  favourite  passages,  which,  though  I 
have  repeated  them  ten  thousand  times,  still  they  rouse  my  manhood 
and  steel  my  resolution  like  inspiration  : 

"  '  On  Reason  build  resolve, 
That  column  of  true  majesty  in  man.' 

— Young. 

"  '  Here,  Alfred,  hero  of  the  State, 

Thy  genius  heaven's  high  will  declare  : 
The  triumph  of  the  truly  great 
Is  never,  never  to  despair  ! 
Is  never  to  despair  ! ' 

—Thomson,  '  Masque  of  Alfred.'" 

For  many  men,  most  men,  perhaps,  such  high-sounding 
phrases  are  hollow  and  pointless,  brass  sounds  and  noth- 
ing more  ;  for  Burns  they  obviously  had  "  a  potency 
of  life."  A  letter  to  Murdoch  earlier  in  his  career  is 
still  more  significant  of  the  support  he  received  from 
books,  turning  poetry  to  the  use  that  the  late  Mr. 
Matthew  Arnold  was  never  weary  of  recommending  : 

"  My  favourite  authors  are  of  the  sentimental  kind,  such  as 
Shenstone,  particularly  his  '  Elegies '  ;  Thomson  ;  *  Man  of 
Feeling,'  a  book  I  prize  next  to  the  Bible  ;  *  Man  of  the  World '; 
Sterne,  especially  his  'Sentimental  Journey';  Macpherson's 
'  Ossian,'  &c.     These    are    the   glorious    models    after   which  I 


360  SUPPLEMENT 

endeavour  to  form  my  conduct ;  and  'tis  incongruous,  'tis  absurd 
to  suppose  that  the  man  whose  mind  glows  with  sentiments 
lighted  up  at  their  sacred  flame — the  man  whose  heart  distends 
with  benevolence  to  all  the  human  race,  he  'who  can  soar  above 
this  little  scene  of  things ' — can  he  descend  to  mind  the  paltry 
concerns  about  which  the  terrae-filial  race  fret  and  fume  and  vex 
themselves  !  O,  how  the  glorious  triumph  swells  my  heart ! 
I  forget  that  I  am  a  poor,  insignificant  devil,  unnoticed  and 
unknown,  stalking  up  and  down  fail's  and  markets,  when  I 
happen  to  be  in  them,  reading  a  page  or  two  of  mankind,  and 
'  catching  the  manners  living  as  they  rise,'  whilst  the  men  of 
business  jostle  me  on  every  side  as  an  idle  incumbrance  in  their 
way." 

Through  that  frank  letter  we  can  look  as  through  an 
open  Avindow  into  the  heart  of  Burns  as  it  was  at  the 
age  of  twenty-four,  and  it  helps  us  to  understand  why 
he  failed  as  a  farmer  and  why  he  succeeded  as  a  poet, 
because  it  shows  us  how  resolutely  his  heart  was  set  on 
one  ambition,  and  how  entirely  his  mind  was  occupied 
with  the  world  of  the  imagination.  At  that  date  the 
ranter  strain  in  Burns's  character  was  but  very  partially 
developed  ;  we  can  see  that  the  "  man  of  feeling  "  was 
then  uppermost  ;  and  we  can  note,  also,  the  working  in 
his  mind  of  another  favorite  ideal  of  the  time, — a  favor- 
ite ideal  among  artists  at  all  times, — that  of  the  specta- 
tor, the  observer,  who  comes  down  from  his  world  of 
dreams  and  meditations  to  read  in  the  great  book  of 
mankind. 

Any  thing  that  I  have  said  would  lead  very  far  from 
my  meaning  if  it  combed  the  impression  that  Burns 
neglected  to  study  either  man  or  nature  from  the  life. 
My  theory,  if  any  thing  so  obvious  can  be  dignified  with 
the  name  of  theory,  only  is  that  it  was  from  literature 
that  his  genius  received  the  original  impulse  and  bent 
to  that  study  by  which  literature  was  so  much  enriched. 
His  poetry  is  not  a  mere  freak  of  nature,  a  thing  sui 
generis,  but  an  organic  part  of  the  body  of  English 
literature,  with  its  attachments  or  points  of  connection 


THE    HISTORICAL    RELATIONSHIPS    OP    BURNS         361 

only  slightly  disguised  by  difference  of  dialect.  It  drew 
its  inspiration  from  literature,  and  it  became  in  its  turn 
a  fruitful  source  of  inspiration  to  two  great  poets  of 
the  next  generation,  Wordsworth  and  Byron.  One 
main  secret  of  Bryon's  fascination  was  the  frank 
sincerity  with  which  he  laid  bare  his  own  personal 
feelings  to  the  world,  abandoning  the  timid  reserve, 
the  polite  reticence  about  self,  that  had  been  the  ruling 
tradition  of  the  eighteenth  century  ;  and  it  may  be 
doubted  whether,  with  all  his  impetuous  strength  and 
defiant  pride,  Byron  would  have  broken  so  completely 
with  this  tradition  if  Burns  had  not  led  the  way.  It  is 
with  the  "  nobly  pensive  "  side  of  Burns,  with  Burns  as 
the  "man  of  feeling,"  that  Wordsworth  connects  him- 
self; and  it  may  be  doubted  whether  Wordsworth 
would  have  reached  the  conviction  which  is  the  root 
and  source  of  so  much  of  his  best  work,  that : 

"  Nature  for  all  conditions  wants  not  power 
To  consecrate,  if  we  have  eyes  to  see 
The  outside  of  her  creatures,  and  to  breathe 
Grandeur  upon  the  very  humblest  face 
Of  human  life" — 

it  may  be  doubted  whether  Wordsworth  would  have 
reached  this  conviction  as  an  inspiring  principle  of 
fresh  poetic  work  if  Burns  had  not  first  taught  him,  to 
use  his  OAvn  words  in  acknowledging  the  obligation  : 

"  How  verse  may  build  a  princely  throne 
On  humble  truth." 

Carlyle,  in  his  celebrated  essay  on  Burns,  in  which, 
with  all  its  eloquence,  he  seems  to  me  to  speak  far  too 
disparagingly  of  Burns's  actual  achievement  as  a  poet, 
regrets  that  his  father's  circumstances  did  not  permit 
him  to  reach  the  university,  and  conjectures  that  he 
might  then  have  "  come  forth  not  as  a  rustic  wonder, 
but  as  a  regular  well-trained  intellectual  workman,  and 


362  SUPPLEMENT 

changed  the  whole  course  of  English  literature."  But, 
after  all,  as  it  was,  Burns  did  something  like  this.  I  do 
not  myself  believe  in  the  possibility  of  revolutionary 
changes  in  literature  ;  the  history  of  literature  is  the 
history  of  a  gradual  development,  advancing  often,  no 
doubt,  by  leaps  and  bounds,  but  always  by  natural 
transition  from  one  stage  to  another.  I  doubt,  there- 
fore, whether  Burns  would  have  "changed  the  whole 
course  of  English  literature"  if  he  had  gone  to  a 
university  ;  but,  as  it  was,  he  exercised  an  important 
influence  on  that  literature,  and  it  is  at  least  probable 
that  he  would  have  been  hindered  rather  than  helped  in 
that  mission  if  his  education  had  been  different  from 
what  it  was.  He  might  have  been  a  happier  man 
otherwise,  but  it  may  be  doubted  whether  he  would 
have  been  a  greater  poet. 


INDEX 


Addison,  6,  8,  53,  101,  104,  105 
Age,  Spirit  of  the.  47,  48 
Akenside,  16,  17,  350,  355 
"  Alastor,"  Shelley's,  quoted,  300 
Anacreon,  Moore's  translation  of, 

2,  224 
Ancient  classics,  Influence  of,  on 

Pope,  39,  41 
"Anecdotes,"  Spence's,  14,  16,  24, 

74 
Arnold,  Matthew,  206,  296,  304 
Articles,  Leading,  8 
Austen,  Jane,  281,  282 

Ballads.  Influence  of  old,  147,  150, 
237 ;  Lyrical,  165.  175,  181,  186 

"Bard, "'Gray's,  98 

Beattie,  158,  260.  337 

"BiographiaLiteraria,"  189,  190 

Boileau,  55 

Bowles,  329,  330 

Burney,  Miss,  116,  120-124 

Burns,146. 147, 154, 158-163, 343-362; 
Erroneous  conceptions  of,  146, 148, 
343 ;  Education  of,  161 ;  Connec- 
tion of,  with  English  critics,  346  ; 
Obligation  of,  to  books,  358,  359  : 
Quotations  from,  154-155,  160, 
351,  353,  354,  356,  359 

Byron,  44,  253-274,  339;  "Childe 
Harold,"  256-261  ;  Identification 
of  Childe  Harold  with  Byron,  260  ; 
"Hours  of  Idleness,"  265;  Com- 
pared to  Hamlet,  274  ;  Quotations 
from,  257-258,  264 

"Campaign,"  Addison's,  6-8 

Campbell,  217-223 

Carlyle,  210,  240,  245,  343,  361 

Carruthers,  13,  329 

"Castle    of    Otranto,"    Walpole's, 

111,  112 
"  Childe  Harold,"  Byron's,  quoted, 

257-258 
Churchill,  130,  335 
Cibber,  77,  82 
Classical  school  of  poetry,  322,  327 


Classics,  Influence  of,  on  Pope,  39, 41 
Coleridge,    190,    207-210,    213-214; 
and   Wordsworth,    174,   181,    183, 
207-208,  212  ;   "  Biographia  Liter- 
aria,"  189,  190 ;  Carlyle   on,  210- 
211 ;  Irresolution  of,  212  ;  Quota- 
tions from,  188-189,  213 
Collins.  93,  331,  337,  350 
Colman,  133 

Connoisseur,  The,  133,  140,  141 
Correctness,  Walsh  on,  25,  349 
Couplet,  Pope's  use  of  the,  43 
Courthope,  77,  79,  81,  307-325 
Cowper,    130-145,    180,    185;    His- 
torical connection  of,  131  ;   Out- 
line of  life  of,  132-140,  142-145  ; 
Earlier  writings  of,  139-143  ;  Quo- 
tations from,  134,  140-141 
Crabbe,  346 

Criticism,   Influence   of,    on    eigh- 
teenth-century poetry,  14 ;  Essay 
on,  Pope's,  35^1 
Croker,  77,  283,  284 

D'Arblay,  Mine.,  see  Burney,  Miss 

Darwin,  Erasmus,  43,  218 

Decay    of    poetry    in    eighteenth 

century,  332 
Defoe,  8,  105 

Descriptive  poetry,  61,  62 
Diary  of  a  lady  of  quality,  101 
Diction,  Poetic,  187-198 
Dilke,   Discovery  of  Pope's  letters 

by,  307 
Disraeli,  291 
"Dunciad,"  75-82,  326 
Duty,  Wordsworth's  Ode  to,  201-202 
Dyer,  70,  71 

Edgeworth,  Miss,  276-280 
Edinburgh  Review,   The,   206,   266, 

268,  292,  294 
Eighteenth-century  poetry,  Defects 

of,  45-46 
Elwin,  28,  33,  77,  307,  309 
Emotion    in  Wordsworth's  poetry, 

199,  200 


363 


364 


INDEX 


Epic,  Pope's  attempt  at,  25,  72,  73 
"Essay  on  Criticism,"  Pope's,  35-41 
Essayists,  Burns  and  the  English, 

347 
Evening,  Collins's  Ode  to,  93 

Pergusson,  348 
Ferrier,  Miss,  289 
Fielding,  108,  110 
Fielding,  Sarah,  118 
French  Revolution,  Influence  of,  on 
literature,  130,  220,  235,  340 

Garrick,  102 

Guai-dian,  The,  29,  32,  50,  153,  346 

Gay,  54,  346 

"Gentle  Shepherd,"  The,  31.  153- 

157,  347,  348 
Georges,  The  Four,  and  literature,  1 
Georgian  Era,  The,  a  literary  epoch, 

9-10 
Gifford.  294,  295 
Glover,  87-89 
Goldsmith,  110,  174,  218 
Gothic  Romance,  111 
Gray,  17,  95-98,  191,  335 
Green,  129,  134 
"  Grongar  Hill,"  Dyer's,  69-70 

Halifax,  Lord,  6 
Hayley,  18-21 
Historical  Romances,  114 
Hunt,  Leigh,  294 

Ideals,  Influence  of,  in  poetry,  47 
Imagination  and  emotion,  199-201 

Jeffrey,  206,  294 

Johnson,  28,  30,  90,  91,  97,  310,  331, 
332,  336 

Keats,  302-306 

Lake  Poets,  The,  207,  208 

Leading  articles,  8 

Lennox,  Mrs.,  118 

"Leonidas,"  Glover's,  87,  88 

Little,  Thomas,  225 

Lovelace,  226 

"  Lycidas,"  Milton's,  29 

"  Lyrical  Ballads,"  165, 175, 181-186 

Lytton,  291 

Macaulay,  84.  119,  120,  257,  328 
Mackenzie,  182,  240,  357.  358 
Macpherson  (Ossian),  115,  359 
Marivaux,  116 
Mason,  20,  42 
Maturin,  285 


Milton,  29 

Mitford,  Miss,  289,  290 
Moore,  224-234  ;  Dr.,  260,  341 
More,  Hannah,  286 
Morgan,  Lady,  283 

Nature,    Poetic  treatment   of,    17, 

50,  51,  61,  318-319 
Novel,  The,  103-128;  Supernatural 

and  historical,  114 

Ode,  Wordsworth's,   to  Dutv,   201- 

202. 
Ode,  Collins's,  to  Evening,  93 
Oliphaut.  Mrs.,  110,  185,  231,  273 
Ossian,  115,  359 

"Pamela,"  Richardson's,  103-110 

Party  writers,  Poets  as,  8 

Passion,  Pope's  theory  of  a  ruling, 
84 

Pastorals,  27-34,  50,  346 

Patronage,  Decline  of  royal,  2 

Pattison,  Mark,  13,  313 

Percy's  "Reliques,"  115,  237 

Periodicals,  8 

Philips,  Ambrose,  32,  346 

"Pleasures  of  Hope,"  Campbell's, 
quoted,  221 

Poetry,  Decay  of,  in  eighteenth 
century,  332  ;  Descriptive,  61,  62  ; 
Diction  proper  to,  187-198  ;  De- 
fects of  Georgian.  45-46;  Iufluence 
of  ideals  in,  47  ;  Lake,  207,  208 

Politics,  Eighteenth-century  litera- 
ture and,  4,  5 

Pope,  Criticism  of,  by  Macaulay, 
11 ;  Decline  in  popularity  of,  13 ; 
Classification  of  poems  of,  21 ; 
Education,  23;  "Essay  on  Criti- 
cism," 35-41  ;  Influence  of  classics 
on,  39  ;  Translations  by,  52,  53  ; 
"Rape  of  the  Lock,"  54-55; 
Moral  character  of,  313  ;  Artifici- 
ality in  verse  of,  319 ;  "  Dunciad," 
75-82,  326 

Porter,  Jane,  287 

"  Prelude,"  Wordsworth's,  166-172 

Radcliffe,  Mrs.,  115,  116,  125-128 

Ramsay,  Allan,  27,  31,  150-158 

"  Rape  of  the  Lock,"  The,  54-57 

Reeve,  Clara,  125,  126 

"  Revolt  of  Islam."  Shelley's, 
quoted,  297-298 

Richardson,  103-110 

Rogers,  217 

Romance,  Supernatural,  111 ;  His- 
torical,  114 


INDEX 


365 


"Kuins  of  Rome,"  Dyer's,  70 

Scotch  songs,  147,  148,  159 

Scott,  44,  231,  256  ;  Martial  spirit  in 
poetry  of,  236  ;  Influence  of  bal- 
lads on,  237  ;  German  influence 
on,  240 ;  Carlyle's  criticism  of, 
245,  286;  The  "Lay,"  248-252, 
338  ;  "  Waverley,"  286-289 

"Seasons,"  Thomson's,  62-68 

Shakespeare,  Pope  on,  15  ;  Gray  on, 
17 

Shelley,  Early  criticisms  of,  293  ; 
Sensitiveness  of,  297 

Shelley,  Mrs.,  289 

Sheridan,  Frances,  118 

Skinner,  158 

Smollett,  110 

Society,  Character  of,  in  Pope's 
time,  49 

"Solitary  Reaper,"  Wordsworth's, 
202-203 

Somerville,  71 

Songs,  Scotch,  147,  148,  159 

Sonnet,  Wordsworth's,  to  Twilight, 
204  ;  To  Steamboats,  205-206 

Southey,  207,  215,  216 

Spectator,  8,  101,  104.  105 

Spence's  anecdotes  of  Pope,  14,  16, 
24,  74 

Spirit  of  the  age,  The,  47,  48 

Stage,  Influence  of  the,  100,  101 

Stanzas,  Shelley's  "Written  in  De- 
jection," quoted,  301-302 


Steele,  29.  32,  104,  347 
Sterne,  110,  182,  357 
Stevenson,  R.  L.,  354-355 

Taine,  M.,  31,  55 

Tatler,  The,  8,  104 

Tennyson,  9,  68 

Thackeray,  1,  82,  110 

Theatre,  Revival  of  the,  100,  101 

Theobald,  77 

Thomson,  58-68 

Troubadours,  228 

"  Tullochgorum,"  158,  159 

Walpole,  99,  111,  112,  115 

Walsh,  24,  26,  345,  349 

Warton,  329,  331 

Watson's  Collection,  150 

"Windsor  Forest,"  Pope's,  30 

"Winter,"  Thomson's,  62-66 

Wit,  42,  319 

Wordsworth,  "Prelude,"  167-172, 
212;  Preface  to  "Lyrical  Bal- 
lads," 165;  "Lyrical  Ballads," 
174,  175  ;  "  Lines  written  above 
Tintern  Abbey,"  176-180;  "The 
Idiot  Boy,"  183-185  ;  Poetic  dic- 
tion, 187-198  ;  Emotion  and  Imag- 
ination, 200-203  ;  Coleridge's  in- 
fluence on,  208 

Wycherley,  24,  26 

Young,  83 

"  Zeluco,"  Moore's,  260,  341 


THE    END 


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